So I’ve been so consumed with making it through my first trimester that I didn’t spend a whole lot of time planning this trip. I figured this is my fourth trip to Rome, and the Calabria portion is all planned out. I bought a TimeOut book for all of Italy and left my TimeOut Rome at home because it was 10 years old. I never looked in the book to realize that it didn’t contain any maps or practical information. Mom and I got to our lovely little convent hotel in Trastevere, checked in with a nice English-speaking front desk person and showered and napped.
Once ready to hit the town, the front desk person now didn’t speak a word of English and didn’t have a map. Our neighborhood isn’t near a subway station so we would have had to take a bus to a train station. Without my TimeOut Rome I couldn’t even remember how and where to buy bus tickets (Bryan will tell you a story about that…), and alas we took a cab, feeling like a defeated American tourist. I realized, while I consider myself a fairly experienced traveller, just how much I’ve relied on Bryan for his willingness to try and speak the language of whatever country we’re in. I had at least bought an Italian phrase dictionary, but the minute someone started talking back to me I’d blurt out “Parlo inglese?”
A very random coincidence took place the day before I left, in that an Italian court reporter that I’ve met at various international conventions named Fausto found me on Facebook. So at least now mom and I had an Italian-speaking friend to do the talking and take us somewhere off the beaten path. He suggested we meet him at the Pantheon and we’d go from there. This was a great area that gave mom plenty of great photo ops, as we were also close to the Spanish Steps and Trevi Fountain. He took us out of the tourist trap area and took us to this awesome little wine bar that had a smorgasbord of Italian goodies for free as part of a happy hour. We said our goodbyes and headed back to the convent where I entered Time Warp Hell. 
I did what I never do and broke the cardinal jetlag rule: I took a nap when I got in. I tried to justify it by saying, well, I’m pregnant and I nap now and it doesn’t keep me from falling asleep at night. WRONG! While I fell asleep by 10, I was up by 1 for the rest of the night. To make things worse, our room had no clock and we had no watches. Mom bought an international cell phone, which we didn’t realize that the time zone was defaulted to Chicago time. So we had thought the time difference was seven hours all day long. In the middle of the night I realized my iPod had clocks of the world, and didn’t realize that my iPod’s EST was on daylight savings, so that would make the time difference five hours. Long story short, I called Bryan to see if he could look at a computer and tell me what time it was, and he wasn’t home and couldn’t. We were supposed to have a wakeup call at 5, but I got up at 4 (which I thought was 5), and that was how our day started.
We flew to Calabria this morning and had a driver drive us to the seaside town of Scalea where we will be staying for the week. I feared for both our lives as it was the scariest display of driving I’ve ever experienced – a 2.5-hour drive took less than 2 hours and we played chicken as he passed several vehicles on the two-way road. Now we are settling in and have our first cooking lesson at 10 tomorrow. Hoping now that we have the time zones figured out, the jetlag will wear off by tomorrow.
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