When in Rome...

Well, we got about 4 inches of snow today in Moscow (despite the mayor implementing a 'cloud seeding' program to spare the city of snow this winter), which is nice since we rarely see snow in Texas, but tough since the only footwear I have here is sneakers. So I'm going to hide out in our apartment for a bit and post some more Italy pics (the sun went down about 6.5 hours ago anyways, around 4pm). Here are some more of the oddities we encountered on our travels through Italy:


Thirsty? These water fountains are scattered through the city of Rome. They are always on; to drink from them, you plug the end of the faucet and the water shoots out through a smaller hole in the top of the spout pipe. (Alright, so maybe we tried to drink out of the faucet before we saw someone do it the "right" way, haha.)





Another interesting thing we discovered immediately is that Italians will park their cars anywhere they will almost halfway sort-of fit. They mostly drive tiny little cars, and we saw them on the sidewalk, double parked in the middle of the road, behind trees, pretty much anywhere they could wedge them. They seemed to have an unusually large number of scrapes and dings too... made me glad we didn't rent a car!




In Italy you don't have to worry about guys leaving the seat up since public toilets have no seats!







Poker anyone?









Local Typical Food?! Just what I was in the mood for! (from the Amalfi Coast)






And here is the strangest port-a-potty I have ever seen, located on Mt. Vesuvius. Just pull the handle and all your unsundries are whisked away by the conveyor belt!