The Mood of Rome

On Friday we ventured out to find the large grocery store that we heard about. We ended up passing the street we needed to turn down because it was called Guiseppe at the one spot and then turned into the other name. We found an ATM that didn't charge me any fees, so needless to say, I'll be going back to that one. If someone hadn't told us what the grocery store looked like, we would have never found it. It was literally a clothing store that we walked into and then the next floor down was the grocery store. A helpful tip when going to the store is to bring extra bags with you, thankfully my roommates suggested that before we left. On our way back we experienced our first taste of the forwardness of Italian men. As two passed by we were greeted with "Very nice. Sexxy." haha It's normal and girls are told just to ignore it, the guys won't be offended.
For dinner our apartment met up with a group of guys who go to John Cabot and we went searching for a place to eat. Without realizing it, we ended up in the Jewish Ghetto of WWII and we walked past some ancient ruins that were actually a circus made by Julius Caesar. We ended up at a restaurant called the Cornucopia. It was a really pretty place and I had the best lasagna and red wine ever! The waitresses here were also amused with our attempts at speaking Italian. It was a fun time making some new friends and we headed back to our apartments to get ready to go out.
Friday night, Trastevere comes to life. Cars and vespas are double and triple parked on the main road. The streets are filled with young people walking to and from bars and mingling in the streets. All the little cafes and bars are crowded and shine light into the streets. There are even some Christmas lights still hanging across the streets and small alleyways. It isn't illegal here to walk around with open liquor so everyone was ambling along with their drinks. We wandered through this fun atmosphere before deciding to walk across the river to a club that the boys had been to the night before. It was quite the hike but we went by the cat sanctuary where the strays are kept and cared for. It is also the place where Caesar was stabbed. But finally we found the place, obvious because of the blue light coming from the doorway. We had come to Club Mood.
This place had a great energy and was the place to be! It was downstairs and had tons of people dancing and different sections of couches for sitting and a bar. I was pleasantly surprised at how tall the Italian men were! As I mentioned before Italian men are very forward and are not afraid to ask you to dance or even to just cut in. One little Italian man in the blue shirt just did not get the hint that we didn't want to dance with him. Even after our guys made a circle around us, he kept dancing next to us trying to cut in. The guys we were with were very protective of us gals and helped us out quite a few times. Overall it was one of my best memories so far! Eventually our group was the center of attention of the dance floor. I'm pretty sure it's because Italian women don't really dance like we do or they were more content sitting on the couches. Or maybe we just stood out as being really American, whatever the reason it was, we had a blast dancing for over three hours! Needless to say we were exhausted when we all finally headed back to our apartments, and the guys were sweethearts walking us back.