The Wardman Wire

… and cultural misunderstandings in restaurants.

We (me and the boss) had a week in Rome last year, and as part of that we “did the Romans” - you know: viaducts, Colosseum, water towers, Temple of Jupiter, Pantheon. No Roman Rabbits , however.

This painting is the Pantheon by Panini .

In our case, we always go and look for local restaurants. In this case we found one, but we fell foul of our own assumptions, and ordered what we thought was a side-salad.

In Rome, however, a salad seems to be a separate course. And it arrived just after we had finished our main course.

A green salad: a large bowl (of the size you might use to casserole a rabbit) full of lettuce, with about half a dozen tomatoes chopped into segments.

I am banned by the boss from including the picture of her expression viewed across the salad bowl, but I will say that it took us the best part of 20 minutes to polish it off.

As a reminder of Romans closer to home, recently I have visited the remains of a Temple of Mithras at Brocolita built by legionaries near Hadrian’s Wall.

You can walk from the road across one of the bleakest, cold, windy and erosive places in the Country, and someone has dug up engraved altar stones that have been buried for almost 2000 years, and exposed the carved design to all that weather - go and see it before it is destroyed.

One of the most monumentally moronic conservation decisions I have seen in my entire life - presumably made by an English Heritage numpty.

And there was me thinking they were out preserve out history.

Tags: brocolita, blogpower, welshcakes, sicily-scene, temple of mithras, legionary, hadrian’s wall, emperor hadrian[tags]brocolita, blogpower, welshcakes, sicily-scene, temple of mithras, legionary, hadrian’s wall, emperor hadrian[/tags]