Trastevere & West End, Brisbane.

I can now confirm that the suburb the studio is in is pretty much the equivalent of my former abode, West End in Brisbane, in a number of ways, chief among which is its proximity to the city centre.

The suburb is across the Tiber (hence, Trans-Tiber... Trastevere) from the CBD, somewhat toward the lower end of the market (though as those at home know, West End in Brisbane is now nearly completely gentrified) and very, very funky. In an ancient kind of way. A maze of charming winding streets and alleys packed with restaurants and bars.

After shaking the cold (am now dragging around a cough, but everyone in Rome at the moment it seems is getting over a cold), I thought it was time to do a little exploring. I'd planned originally to visit an Aussie pub called Ned Kelly, but fortunately fate intervened in the form of an alternative impulse and kicked my unadventurous backside off the tram in Trastevere proper.

I'd looked in the trusty Lonely Planet for a straniero-friendly, and picked one, Mr. Brown's; but I soon realised I had buckley's of finding one pub in the maze of alleyways and sidestreets... so I thought I'd wing it, and after about fifteen minutes I pulled into a bar with no signage, from which an ambient blue light (and some English words!) emanated. Also, it was still happy hour.

After about five minutes at the bar, I noticed, up on the wall, a display cabinet, and in the cabinet, something remarkable: an old cricket bat, three stumps and a ball! A warmth spread slowly throughout my body; I'd come to the right place. Then I saw the actual sign: 'Mr. Brown's'! The one pub I'd stumbled into completely at random, having wandered blindly from laneway to laneway, turned out to be the very one I was looking for in the first place!

Anyway, I spent most of the night propping up the bar with a couple of guys, one from New Zealand, the other from Belgium. The bartenders were locals, but originally from Ethiopia and Bangladesh. We then formed a table, at which no two people were from the same country! Going round the table, we had a Welsh, a Scot, a French, an American, a Portugese, a Belgian, an Italian, a Kiwi and an Aussie!

My heart sank a bit when I realised most everyone has much, much more Italian than I do, though they all understood I was fresh off the boat - it's particularly depressing when you try out your very best 'una Heiniken per favore' and the waitress justs laughs at you, before addressing you in English! But by the end of the night I was doing much better, and seemed to have a small reservoir of words that I could draw from to make conversation with the locals (plus of course many of them have a fair bit of English).