Origins

Okay, I think I've figured out the origin of a saying. Hear me out on this one:

A guy goes on a vacation of Italy and ends up in Rome. He's making his way through the city just fine, but is having real problems crossing the street. Many of the intersections don't have walk lights and the cars won't stop for him like they do in North America. Furthermore, even at the ones with walk lights, the motorcycles often don't follow the signals. The guy was having a really hard time until he saw that some people would just cross when it was (more or less) safe to do so - regardless of what the lights indicated. After closer inspection he realized that these people were not tourists, and that they must live here and do this all the time.

The man goes home and is telling his friends about the different lessons he learned: the pizza will disappoint you, but the pasta makes up for it. You will be charged cover to get into restaurants. Gelato is possibly the best thing in the world, even if it is too expensive and, oh yeah! In Rome, find someone who looks like the live there and just do what they do. So his friends go on a trip to Italy several years later and are trying to remember what their friend said. They order the pizza and are, indeed, disappointed, but the pasta and gelato are so good that their faith in Italian food is restored. But they get to Rome and encounter the same problems while trying to cross the street because they had forgotten the last piece of advice. Then, as they are trying to figure out how they are going to cross a particularly main street, they see someone who looks very Italian start crossing the street, even though the sign says "DON'T WALK". They both shout "When in Rome, do as the Romans do!!"

And there you have it; the origin of a saying.

I am fully convinced that the saying is specifically in reference to the proper way to cross the street in Rome and no one will ever convince me otherwise. But seriously, Rome is nuts. There is so much nice stuff to see here, but the weather is being really difficult. The other day as I was writing that post and saying it couldn't make up it's mind, it decided to be very difficult and start hailing. It had been gorgeously sunny in the morning and so Katie and I hadn't brought our umbrellas with us. Oh, and I was wearing sandals. We stood in the foyer of the internet cafè for probably 15 minutes without the rain letting up at all, but finally decided that it was only 2 blocks to our hotel and we should just run and deal with our wet clothes when we get there. Meh, whatchoo gonna do, right?

Okay, Katie is running a marathon today while I'm sitting here, and I want to go wave at her at about the 32km mark. Also, it's her birthday. How many of you ran marathons on your last birthday? Yeah, that's what I thought. Slackers.