Walk like an Italian

We don't know if this is Rome-specific or just the way any big city behaves, but we can't believe how rude people are in the everyday function of sharing a sidewalk. First off, they don't make eye contact... ever. I've grown a nice pair of sideburns and that isn't even enough to draw attention. But more upsetting is that they don't seem to surrender any part of the sidewalk to oncoming traffic. Three Italians could be walking arm-in-arm spanning the entire sidewalk and they would barely budge to let a sole pedestrian squeeze by without driving them into a wall.

After spending 3 months being the nice Canadians, with our overuse of the phrase "Scusi", and stepping into traffic rather than fight with oncoming Italedestrians (Italian pedestrians), we'd had enough. So this afternoon we set out for a walk with one rule - don't move an inch!

Miles would be proud of the shoulder checks I threw on men and women alike. Oh, I forgot to mention that Sue has found there is no chivalry in Italy. An oncoming woman gets even poorer treatment than her testosterone-filled counterpart.

So there we were, walking like Italians, bumping into everything we could. Sue's giggling almost gave us away but we succeeded in getting to our destinations without giving up any sidewalk. I admit that we changed the rules on the fly when the hefty nun approached, but other than that - bang, pow, kaboom!

When we returned home, we assessed the physical damage and agreed that we were lucky there were no nude spas in our future. Although... the bruised arms and shoulders might have distracted away from other parts of our anatomy.