Home at Last

Home at last, Thank God Almighty, we are home at last!

What a hectic and scary last few days……..

On Saturday as we ventured around Rome, we kept seeing an overabundance of police presence. Police on every street corner, paddy wagons and police cars everywhere. All heavily armed with machine guns, even a police helicopter circling over the central part of Rome. At one point Dear Hubby did stop to speak to a couple of  officers and in broken English managed to ascertain that they were moving someone, or something…or that’s what we thought he meant.

Actually what we found out later was that the officer actually meant  “Movement” as in protest. As we came close to the street our hotel was on, we found the street  blocked off and by now the police had riot shields out. You couldn’t get onto our street so we had to take another  little  street and go a back way. Dear Hubby asked a fellow that spoke English very well if he knew what was going on. He proceeded to tell us that for the last two days there had been huge protests by the unions called anti-austerity protests. The day before we arrived, they had shut down the transportation around Rome, even cancelling about 100 flights causing complete chaos. Needless to say, our worst nightmare.  We hurried back to the hotel to see if we could get any updates on the television or the internet. On the Saturday night the protests had started escalating and things got uglier. From out hotel room we could hear the helicopter circling and the police sirens were more pronounced. It makes one feel very, very uncomfortable, especially in a foreign country.

Our flight left today at 3pm and by then, the trouble in the city had calmed down so we had an easy exit. Glad to be heading home, safe and sound.