When In Rome: Week 3

Just a few random things I've been thinking/noticing lately about this beautiful city I'm living in:

Rome is a very dog-friendly city... this doesn't help me with the fact that I miss my golden retriever a ton! People take their dogs everywhere and there are even little hooks that people can attach their leashes to outside of shops and markets and such. A lot of cafes and shops are dog-friendly, too. Also, everybody dresses their dogs here (at least right now since it's a little colder out). It's adorable. BUT people don't seem to care as much about picking up dog poop around here so you have to be careful when you're walking around because there's usually dog poop all over the sidewalks (or at the bases of trees in the middle of the sidewalks).
A lot of people order food to go (or da portare via, as I learned today in Italian class), but they don't eat and walk at the same time. There's no concept of getting breakfast and eating it on your way to school/work in the morning. And if you order a coffee to go, usually the lids on the cups don't have drinking holes in them, so you have to take the lid off in order to drink from it, which isn't easy to do while you're walking. Apparently Italians consider eating on the go to be in bad form. So if they order something to go, they either take it with them to wherever they're going or they stand right outside the door and eat it. Definitely got a few stares the other morning as I was eating my morning croissant in the metro while waiting for my train to go to school... oops.
People smoke everywhere. Definitely not something I'm used to because of all of the public secondhand smoke laws in America. People don't usually smoke inside, but they'll stand right outside the door to smoke. But I rarely see Italians walking and smoking at the same time (just like eating and walking). So I definitely don't take the fact that in America, I can walk down the sidewalk without inhaling clouds of smoke every time I walk past a shop or a cafe for granted.
No open container laws. People drink everywhere. You can buy alcohol almost anywhere--even McDonald's sells beer. We went to the Trevi Fountain the other night and there was a group of people sitting on the steps openly sharing a bottle of wine--no big deal. If there is any kind of law regulating where you can buy/drink alcohol, I sure haven't noticed. Coming from a state where you can't buy cold beer at the grocery store and nobody is allowed to sell alcohol on Sundays, this is so weird for me!
I'm really starting to think there is no such thing as junk food here because even what we would think of as junk food isn't really made out of junk. We went to McDonald's today just to try it and let me tell you, I don't know how McDonald's gets away with selling the crap they do in America because it is 100000x better here! The one we went to had a separate McCafe complex that had a real espresso machine and what looked like DELICIOUS desserts and pastries. Even better than what a Starbucks in America would have. And the food is so much better, too. I just got a cheeseburger and fries, but I didn't walk away with that heavy feeling in my stomach that you get after eating American fast food. So I won't be eating McDonald's every day here obviously, but it was interesting to try it at least once and now I have higher standards for McDonald's and all fast food at home! We also walked past a Burger King and a Subway that looked like they were both similarly high quality and more gourmet than their American counterparts.

Also, I went out today to do my first assignment for my digital photography class. It was kind of an interesting assignment: we were supposed to pick a starting point, take interesting pictures at that starting point, walk 11 steps, and take another picture. I had to do that 20 times to get a total of 20 good images to turn in and 4 to critique in front of my class. I started out in Piazza del Popolo, the square close to my school, and continued walking down Via del Corso, one of the big shopping areas in the city. Here are some of the pictures I took... enjoy! Some of these are also from an outing we made in class last week to a church and its surrounding area in the square.