Our flight home consisted of a Sunday evening flight to Paris with an overnight stay there. Then we flew to Houston and on to Albuquerque on Monday, arriving in the late afternoon. At CDG we were treated as transit passengers, so we were relieved of going through one of the steps of security before getting on the plane. After going through the metal detectors, the security folks had another line where they were hand-checking every bag and wanding every person. Wh...

Outside our apartment on the way to the Metro stop, we pass by a long string of advertising signs. The signs are different every time we pass by. It seems that one candidate will cover a long stretch of the signs with a series of identical paper posters, only to have them shredded or covered over with another candidate's signs before the day is over. The signs we see in the mornings as we are going out for the day are different than the ones we see in the evening...

This morning while Phil worked on school stuff, I walked down the street looking for a quick breakfast. I bought some fruit and snacks at the alimentari that we had gone to earlier in the week. The shop was busy with locals doing their shopping. Quite a few people had full baskets of groceries, more than I expected. There were still a few though that seemed to be buying just enough food for one day. On the way back to the apartment, I tried a different shop and...

Trying to see as many places as we can while we are here, we made stops at the Trevi Fountain, the Piazza del Popolo, the Spanish Steps, the Pantheon, the Capitoline Museum, the Victor Emmanuel monument, and Trajan's Column, but we started the morning with a tour of the Borghese Gallery. Following advice from the guidebooks we read, we went upstairs to the Pinacoteca first while most of the visitors were on the first floor. After touring there, we went down to th...

We returned to Rome on an afternoon train from Pisa. We did find our seats in first class this time, only to find someone else sitting in one of them. She got up willingly and moved on when she could tell we were looking at the seats. On this train, our seats were in a compartment for six. Two of the others in there were young women who never stopped talking for the entire 3 hour trip back to Rome. Usually the chatter of other people on a plane or train is just b...