good flicks

Surprisingly enough, there are some good Italian flicks in the theaters right now. Check them out!

Hai paura del buio

Il primo incarico

Tatanka

Il gioiellino

Dr. Pepper

Look what I happened upon today... good ol' Dr. Pepper! I'm not a huge soda drinker but I do love me some sweet bubbles occasionally. I've personally never seen the Pepper in Rome before, but this one bar on Via Roma Libera #13 is selling it for 3.50 euro. Highway robbery if you ask me but if you ever have a craving for it, now you know where to get it!

pleather

Finally, Trenitalia realized that having fabric-covered seats in the trenino (such as the Fiumicino Airport-Tiburtina line) was extremely unhygienic and all-around a bad idea.

Looks like pleather will be taking over. No more soiled, stinky, stained seats. Three cheers for pleather!

could it be??

The other day I stepped on this flyer in my neighborhood:

A new gym? AND they're offering free classes for 3 days (aka "open days" which sounds dumb as hell). Obviously I went this morning and had a kick-ass class with a kick-ass instructor, Paolo.

This place is located in the same spot where JC Welfare was BUT they've expanded and spruced it up. FYI: from what I was told, JC Welfare pretty much closed down after collecting initiation fees from their members. Wow, glad I never signed up there... that name alone was reason enough not to!

I digress, this place seems promising. Prices are more reasonable: 60€ initiation fee, one-year membership for 60€ a month (sadly, they don't do month-to-month), or 3 months for 255€ (yikes!). One annoying, senseless thing: if you need/want to freeze your membership, you have to pay 5€ extra a month, so essentially the monthly cost becomes 65€ if, like me, you are gone for 3 months every year. I may have to contest this because it makes no sense to me. I'm hoping they'll be reasonable and meet me halfway.

AND they say they will be expanding the place as well to add a pilates room and a spinning room! We'll see... but honestly, it's fine as is! They have lots of equipment, two rooms for classes, nice locker rooms, etc. Could it be? Have I finally found a decent gym in Trastevere? Stay tuned...

If you have free time in the next few days, GO try it out EASYFITCLUB. They're pleasant people too.

Famers' market

In the past few years, I kept noticing posters in Rome advertising "Farmer's Market" (ahem: unless it's just one farmer selling his/her goods, you might want to rethink where you placed that apostrophe!) but I never bothered to follow up... until recently. A dear friend of mine went to the farmers' market in Testaccio and raved about the great prices and excellent quality of the produce. So we went together last week. The market is located indoors and has a decent sized selection of only LOCAL goods.

You can get incredibly delicious in-season fruits and vegetables, cheese, bread, homemade pasta, honey, jam, sweets, etc. and the prices are lower than "mercato" or supermarket prices because there's no middle man, it's just a farmer selling goods directly to the consumer.

I couldn't help but chuckle about the newly adopted "farmers' market" term because traditionally, all mercati used to be like this: they were filled with local farmers selling their goods directly to consumers at reasonable prices. But then things went awry and these stands were selling all produce at any time of the year. At my mercato in Trastevere, for example, I managed to find only one real farmer: he and his daughter have a limited selection and quantity of in-season produce. They don't have cases and cases of apples with "Melinda" stickers on them, they only sell fava beans when they're in season, if you go do your shopping late in the morning you'll often find that all the goods have already been snatched by the neighborhood's old women who flock to that stand as if it were Mecca.

It's amusing but sad that Italians had to borrow our term "famers' market" to make the age-old mercato tradition seem like something new and trendy. Italians need to realize that some things are better left unchanged.

Close, but no cigar

I give ATAC props for installing these digital countdown clocks at some of the major bus stops... BUT (you knew that was coming, didn't you?) they still need to tweak the system a bit. I always dread reading "A Capolinea" (at the end of the line) beside a bus number because it gives you no indication at all of when the bus will in fact come by- it could be in 2 minutes, it could be in 20 minutes... I've waiting as long as 25 minutes. Not even my beloved iPhone 4 and its ATAC mobile app can save me because it feeds from the same source as these countdown clocks.

I know, I know, beggars can't be choosers but still, it would make life a tad easier to actually know how long the bus will sit at the end of the line (read: how long of a cigarette/coffee break the driver intends to take) so I can plan accordingly. Maybe I'll write to ATAC about this... cue hysterical laughter.

Sephora

I know people are always grumbling about globalization and the demise of mom & pop shops, but I have to say I am thrilled that Rome now has several Sephora stores. For years we've been at the mercy of overly priced & overly rude profumerie where pushy & impatient salespeople were up in your grill the second you set foot in the shop, where you could barely touch a product let alone look its the label, where asking questions about a product or its ingredients was frowned upon (I recall once asking if a product contained parabens, the salesperson basically laughed at my concern saying it was nonsense), where merely mentioning the word "sample" caused jaws to drop and attitudes to flare up (I'm convinced the owners of these profumerie have stockpiles of samples at home though), where prices were never clearly marked so you could get jacked depending on your accent or what the salesperson imagined you could spend. Trips to these profumerie always ended with me leaving empty-handed or me buying a 50 euro product I used once and tossed out.

Enter Sephora.

Pure bliss: tons of products in various price ranges, where you can actually touch the products, look at their labels, and GASP... get samples! Seriously, for all I care all the other profumerie can go out of business. I finally have a place in Italy where I can buy products and not feel annoyed, abused, or ripped off. Hooray for Sephora!