Italy Trip - Day Fifteen

Wednesday May 30

I woke up at 8:20, packed everything in sight and checked out of Giovy after breakfast.
I left my luggage at the Termini and hit one of the stores in the attached mall. I got some flowery perfume for my niece and some mango vanilla stuff for myself. I always visit the zoo on vacation, but I hadn't seen it listed in any guidebooks, so had to look it up online. I got off the Metro at Flaminio and walked about a mile through Villa Borghese to the zoo and paid 8.50 Euros for admission. There is a public dog park adjacent to the zoo, and the nearest enclosure to the park is the hyenas! I wonder how many dogs go wild after hearing or smelling them. I saw a peahen with lots of chicks roaming free around the zoo, as well as two peacocks. The zoo has a big habitat built for the bears and in it they have comparison pictures of what the exhibit used to look like. It was basically just a bare room, so it's nice to see the improvement.

After the zoo I walked by the Modern Art Museum and took a bus back to the Metro, which brought me back to the Termini. I went online a bit more, got my luggage put of storage and took the same 6 Euro bus back to Ciampino. I got there about 7:20, since my flight was at 10. In the airport, I got some perfume at the duty free shop and popcorn for a snack. I didn't see popcorn much in Italy, and this package said "Popcorn not fried" and called it Air Corn. It was real popcorn though, not those puffcorn kernels.

Ryan Air started the boarding call at 9:30, changed the gate from 8 to 4 and then back to 8. I sat on the floor at times since there were hardly any chairs around the gate. Most of us ended up standing for almost an hour before getting on the buses to bring us out to the plane, so it was a mad dash for seats. It was a short flight and the line at UK Immigration looked shorter then the first one.

It was shorter, but it did not move nearly as fast. It took over an hour to get through. I had a ticket for the Stansted National Express bus, and I nearly missed the 1:05am because I couldn't find the stop. But, I hopped on just in time. When the driver asked me if I was going to Victoria Station, I said, "Si", because I was so used to saying it in Italy. At Victoria, a guy asked us if we wanted taxis as soon as we got off. I thought he was going to hail one, but it turned out he was a gypsy cab. He got chided by the police on the way for going too fast or running a red light, I don't remember. I saw the London Eye, the pickle, Big Ben and the full moon as we drove to my hotel.
I got there about 2:30am and fell into bed.

Day Sixteen

I had a dream last night...

I was in an unspecific Russian city for work and had to meet this grey haired man at the end of the day because I had no idea how to get back to my hotel. He drove up on a golf cart type thing and asked why I was waiting in this lobby, and I told him it was because I was all turned around. Then, a Chinese woman leads me across the lobby towards a big wall, but before she gets to the wall, she goes down a steep set of stairs that I had no clue were there. It was an optical illusion so you couldn't see them until you were at the very edge of the floor. We went down the stairs and then had to like slip under the floor onto another set of steep stairs, and I remember thinking, "My grandparents could never have done that," because it was a tight fit. But then my grandmother was at the bottom and hurrying me along. I was surprised that she had made it down the stairs, but she just rushed me through a door and up a ramp. We were in a zoo watching a tiger exhibit, which had a big pool and a few rocks. The landing we were standing on seemed too close to the tigers, but then I figured they wouldn't build an exhibit the animals could easily escape. But all of a sudden one of the tigers did get out and came toward us! My grandmother and I, along with a few other zoo visitors, backed up along the ramp and I tried to close a door to keep the tiger in, but it was too late. Now the tiger had turned into an alligator and was coming towards my grandmother and I, so I grabbed her and hung off the side of the ramp, kicking at it when it got too close. Finally, zoo security released a long, brown dog onto the ramp and it like herded the alligator back into it's enclosure.

Dreamt last night

I am in the audience of some kind of live variety show and a stunt with bats goes wrong. A guy has to climb up a wooden ladder to rescue his daughter who was so covered in bats that I couldn't tell she was there. The guy is mad and says he and his family are leaving, so the cast decides that the whole weekend is cancelled.

I am with my niece, uncle and Jessica Simpson. We are disappointed about the cancellation because we're staying at a hotel and are trying to figure out if they will let us check out now instead of staying all weekend. We are playing in the game room and realize it is 3:30pm, too late to check out. Jessica says we should see if we can trick them into letting us check out even though my niece is still in the room and we haven't packed. I tell her we would have to give them the keys and would not be able to get our luggage if we did that. Then we try to figure out how to drive my uncle back home, since we are in Duluth and his house is on my way home.

Dream

I had the following dream on Saturday night:

There were two brown recluse spiders, a male and female, loose in the apartment where the dream took place. The male was the size of a human hand and looked like a white crab instead of a spider, and the female was tiny. She was made up of 3 or four tiny brown things shaped like toilet plungers, but they were only about a half an inch long. I knew they were dangerous, and my sister's grey kitty was trying to attack the female, so I shooed the cat away when the female bit me on my left hand. In the dream, I knew it was a fatal bite, but someone told me I would be okay, and it was no worse than a bee sting. I looked on my hand, which was hurting by this time, to see a big slash, two teardrop shaped wounds and two puncture wounds. We kept trying to trap the two spiders, but they kept escaping out of the cups and jars we'd catch them in.