I joined the Italian Hash House Harriers group for a day of memorable walk cum jog and beer drinking event while I was in Rome. It was interesting to join a group of people from Italy, Canada, Australia, Finland and US for a jog in the countryside. We had a singing and creative beer drinking session after the jog and end the day in an Italian restaurant eating traditional Italian Pizza.
The Vatican City is in Rome. It is the headquarters of the Roman Catholic Church. This is the world’s smallest independent nation-state, with 44 hectares in size. You just need to take about an hour to walk through the whole country.
You could climb to the top and have a nice aerial view.
You could walk into the city for free. However, you will have to pay to enter the Sistine Chapel and Vatican Museums. I went inside the both of them and recommend that you should also go inside. At the end of the route, you could see the paintings of Michelangelo on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. It was so beautiful that I just want to stay there as long as I could.
My trip to Italy is full of adventure. This is my close encounter in Rome.
When I was passing by the Colosseum along the road via di S. Gregorio, I turned the corner and walked along via del Cerchi. There was a big empty field on the left and the Palatino was on the right. There was not many people along the road. I was a bit tired and stopped to get some water from my bag. A young Russian man, age about late 20s, came to me and asked for direction to his hotel.
He said he had just arrived in Rome and he was travelling alone. I told him I have just arrived in the morning and I was also travelling alone. We talked for a while and he asked me to take some pictures of him with the empty field as the back ground. I felt a bit strange and wondered why he didn’t want the Palatino or the church as the background.
A few minutes later, two men came from my behind and identified themselves as policemen. They asked whether we were carrying any drugs and wanted a check. The Russian voluntarily showed his wallet to the two men and later the two men wanted me to show them the items in my haversack.
I took out the items from my bag slowly one by one. I suspected these two men are not real policemen. I read about cases like this in the local newspaper. The victim was asked to go to a quite corner for a full body check for drug and ended up naked while the two men ran away with his money and other belongings.
I was lucky. The two men found that I did not have much money with me and let me go. I saw some tourists passing by and shouted at them to get attention. The Russian told me that he suddenly remembered someone told him his hotel was on the other side and walked away. I continued to walk towards S. Maria in Cosmedin to see the mouth of truth.
I think back and wonder could the Russian and the two men were together as a gang trying to cheat tourists. I was not cheated could be that I was steady when they questioned me. But I would not want such incident to happen again.
Travelling alone is not easy especially when you do not understand the language in that foreign country. Nevertheless, despite this bad incident, I will still want to visit Rome again.