Day in Rome – Shopping Day – May 12, 2022

Time to go shopping! I am on the search for 2 things – leather gloves at a store my friend Leah recommended and merino wool from Italy. The leather glove store is near the Spanish Steps so we will give seeing them again and another try! The knitting store that I found is in the Jewish District of Rome, which I understand is pretty interesting so that is our next stop on our shopping day! Allons-y! So off we walked to the Spanish Steps and voila! We could see them from the top this time! Very cool view from the balcony – there is a 2nd tier balcony about 20 steps down and then the actual steps down to the bottom, however we are going to take a different way down – I hope! Sidebar – on May 10th, an “out of town tourist” drove a Maserati down the Spanish Steps. No idea how he managed to take the “wrong turn” that he said he did. That was some strange driving! They were repaired by the time we saw them on the 12th. So instead of going down to the street the way we did the other way (lets call that the long way) we took the shorter route this time – a VERY steep road that goes up right next to the Spanish Steps! Boy was I glad we were going down it! At the bottom I started looking for the gloves shop as it was right on the main boulevard. Low and behold – it is now a jewelry store! That does not happen very often I am told – families own stores for decades. We had walked past a glove store about 10 stores back so we returned there and asked the gentleman about where the store Leah recommended might be and it closed 2 years ago and the man retired. So saying I was in a glove store and it smelled fantastic, I decided to buy my gloves there! Just as Leah had mentioned – they look at your hands, squeeze your fingers and go get you your gloves! Normally, women are helped upstairs on the 2nd floor by the “madam” however that was not happening for me in this small store so they brought the gloves to me! They put baby powder on my hands (they were a bit sweaty from my walker) and on they went like a glove (no pun intended)! WOW – they feel like butter on my hands! SOLD! While in the store, Andrew found the taxi stand and we were off this time to the Jewish neighbourhood. We arrived right when the wool store had closed for their “siesta” time so we walked around, had a beverage, checked out a textile store (their prices in Euros are the same as I would pay in Canada – such as $10 CDN for cotton is 10 Euros for cotton) and then the Wool shop opened. The lady spoke no English. With my very basic Italian, I was able to pick up 10 burgundy and 8 lilac 50g sport weight yarn and 3 mohair burgundy 100g fingerling weight yarn, all made in Italy and all beautiful for 100 Euros! We then walked, as we were nearby to the Ponte Fabricio, which is a pedestrian bridge that crosses the Tiber river onto a small island where there is a church. We were planning on going to the Trastevere neighbourhood for dinner which is where the next bridge off the island takes one too. However we found that the restaurants would not be opening to 7:30pm which was another hour and a half, and as it was our last night in Rome, and it was a nice night, I wanted to get a sunset picture of the Coliseum. So instead looking on my phone (I got a cheap European phone and SIM before we left so I could use it for driving directions and situations like this) there was a bus stop nearby that a single bus ride would take us to the Coliseum. How hard could that be – the busses do have wheelchair signs on them! Alas, I am still hurting from the bus ride several days later! We took the 118 bus and I went to the back door where the wheelchair sign is and the ramp did not come down. I know that the bus driver saw me as I had signaled him to stop as I had seen others do. The step up to the bus was about 3 feet high. I did not know what to do so Andrew put my walker on the bus and grabbed me and yanked me onto the bus as a lady in Italian yelled at the bus driver to stop (he had started moving the bus) as there was a disabled person getting on. Yikes! No wonder the concierge told me not to try the busses! I sat in the accessible location and buzzed the wheelchair buzzer when we needed to get off (you would think that would be a signal for the ramp??? But no, I had to fly on my magic carpet off the bus and Andrew basically had to catch me. Enough said. No more busses! At the coliseum, we hung around for a while and took some pictures – Andrew got a great one using my old phone and then we went across the street to a “natural” restaurant where on top of GF pasta they had GF pizza too and to top it off – GLUTEN FREE Tiramisu! I was in heaven! Comments on pictures to come very soon!

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