Encounter at Gianicolense 168

So I feel like I haven't blogged in awhile, but in reality I guess it hasn't been that long. Either way, I'll give you guys a good mid week update on me.

So yesterday I had an interesting experience outside my apartment door. This wasn't any average run into a neighbor at the door encounter either. I wasn't planning on blogging about it but so far, the two people that have heard about it had an initial response of telling me I need to blog about. So I'll give my followers what they want (Gadhafi, you could learn something from me).

So let me set the scene for you. Juan and I went shopping yesterday afternoon. Upon our return to our apartment building door on the ground level, my stomach called. So, I decided to go to the bar next door to grab a panini while Juan took the groceries upstairs. Of course, he didn't have his key so I lent him mine, this meant that I would have to buzz in up to him to get let him. This detail is important.

[For anyone who has never lived in an apartment building before, they all have a panel outside the building with a buzzer button to each unit so that guests can buzz up for their friend to them push their buzzer to unlock the door and let them in. Our fancy apartment also has a camera feed that automatically turns on on our display screen up here when it gets buzzed so that we can see who is buzzing to come in.] -Neat, huh?

Okay back to the story. So I buy my panini (which happened to be mozzarella, prosciutto and verdura - very healthy for me) and go to our door to buzz Juan. This bar is literally the door next to our apartment door, so convenient (spell check has auto-corrected me every time that I've used that word in this blog, I can't seem to ever spell it right) for my croissant and espresso in the morning. As I'm waiting for him to answer, I'm watching these 3 girls take pictures of themselves by this parked car on the street "Oh, some one must have just gotten them self a new car" - thought I. Then, they turn to me and start talking to me in Italian. Now I'm no expert yet, but she kept holding the camera up so I asked in broken Italian if they wanted me to take a picture of them (reasonable assumption, right?) Wrong. So turns out, they wanted to take a picture with yours truly.

Alright so hold on, you're probably wondering why I'm blogging about this, because Michael, don't pretty girls ask you to be in their picture every day. Well, blogosphere, surprisingly not. As the one girl got ready to take the picture, the other two strutted over towards me, both of them smiling looking deep into my eyes in the kind of way that my cat Belgie looks at me when she wants me to feed her a treat. "That's odd", I thought. In the meantime, I had already buzzed for Juan, who had buzzed open the door but I was preoccupied at that point so he was just watching the video feed of this going on outside from safe up above. Okay, so as we're posing for this picture, I begin to ask myself, "Michael, is it normal for two stranger girls' hands to be running up your legs while posing for a picture that they asked for?Oh wait, nope this definitely doesn't normally happen."

So while you're mind was wandering there, imagining what happened, I'll fill you in. Turns out they were trying to pull a fast one on me. Next thing I know, during that picture, that seemed to take forever for the girl to take, while they were being all touchy feeling, I felt the girl on my left latch on after feeling around for my wallet in my left pants pocket. I may be an American college kid, but I'm not that stupid. After quickly taking a step back, they ditched the extra flirty routine and basically stood there around me demanding money from me. As Deion 'Primetime' Sanders would say, "#Hold On Playa!". Let me get this straight. You make me pose in a picture with you, while you do what I'm left to assume was a poor attempt to pick pocket me, THEN you tell me that since I let you take a picture with me, that I owe you money. This conversation ends now, Mike is hungry. You don't know even understand who you're messing with. They ditched the whole picture-cost thing and then just flat out started begging for euro's, now in English, saying that they needed money for lunch. I was fed up, I went to the go-to method of getting beggars away here. I said, in slow and loud English, "I am American, I do not speak Italian, Bye Bye." See the beauty of this was that it was both a slap-in-the-face to them because they all knew by that point I was capable of speaking at least some Italian, but it also quickly ended this weird encounter.

I promptly grabbed my panini from the ground and got buzzed in by Juan and shut the door in their face. Moral of this story is I guess it's not my great looks that make people want to stare and take picture of me. O well.. Also, I guess the other moral is not to let gypsies try and steal your money. From then I continued my normal Monday routine of class at 5:15 and eating chicken cordon bleu at night for dinner with what I found to be the cheapest beer in Rome. 60 cents for a 50cl double-tall can, GoldStern, out of Belgium. It tastes for what I paid for..

I hope that story was entertaining to your mid-week blues.