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Road to paradise pockmarked with potholes of dying cell phones, Indian visas and chaotic Sri Lankan bus stations

My Goyambokka Guesthouse atop a hill above one of the prettiest beaches in Asia.

It took us one hour to get out of Colombo. I saw nothing appealing. Not one nice park, a pretty building, a nice restaurant. It’s like a city designed to sell electronics and cheap clothes. I haven’t seen a postcard. However, once we cleared city limits the country opened up like a flower. Giant green palm trees were everywhere. Entire forests enveloped small houses where people gathered and chatted on bicycles. Houses stood on stilts where people on their balconies could touch the palm trees that were nearly as big as their decks. Red clay roads snaked up into the jungle. I saw a sign reading, “DANGER: PEACOCKS AHEAD.”

On the coast road I saw the moon, full as a big wheel of cheese, shining above a relatively clean river as it flowed toward the sea. It screamed for a photograph. Instead, I screamed for a beer.
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Sri Lanka: The war is over but my war with technology has just begun as my iPhone is dying

This tea picker won my heart and about 12 cents.

As I embark on a dream month-long journey to Sri Lanka and India, Sri Lanka is six years removed from the longest war in Asian history. People are smiling again. The roads are safe again. India’s economy is booming and I am headed to Kerala, the sliver of a state that hugs India’s southwest corner and is the most educated, safest and least densely populated state in the country.

Yet I am faced with no Internet, no Facebook photos, no Whatsapp. The prospects are numbing. I have become so modernized, so chained to my iPhone, it’s like losing my backpack or passport. How will I survive?
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Tour of Teatro di Marcello, Jewish Ghetto, Tiberina Island covers 2,000 years of Roman history

Teatro di Marcello looks like the Colosseum but it was built nearly 100 years earlier.

I took a guided tour today of three of Rome’s oft-overlooked sites, all of which remain close to my heart: Teatro di Marcello, the Jewish Ghetto and Tiberina Island. Since I moved to the nearby Testaccio neighborhood a year ago, Teatro di Marcello has been my bus stop where I oft wait until the wee hours of the morning to be whisked along the Tiber River and home. I’d stand there with a collection of Bangladeshi kitchen help getting off work and tipsy teens and look into the darkened windows of the old theater. But not all of them are dark. The top floor is now apartments. Talk about a room with a view. Conducting the tour was Massimiliano Francia, the best guide in Rome, a man whose vast knowledge makes me wonder if he actually knew Nero personally.
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New A.S. Roma stadium will combine Ancient Rome with future architecture

Architect Dan Meis explains to a packed crowd how he'll make Stadio della Roma a new destination in Rome.

However, last night I saw Rome all modernized and glittery. And I liked it. A lot. It’s not in the form of a water park or a business center or a god-forsaken mall. It’s a stadium. My beloved A.S. Roma, which started in 1927 in old Stadio Testaccio near my apartment the next year and has played in iconic Stadio Olimpico since 1953, is moving into new digs. Stadio della Roma will be the envy of every stadium in Europe. Fans of cross-town Lazio may as well hide their eyes when they drive by it on the way to the beach. It is going to combine the visionary trappings of modern commercialization with features from the Roman Colosseum. Considering the Colosseum was built in 79 AD and the stadium is tentatively scheduled to open in 2016 AD, this project is taking “back to the future” to a level never seen before.
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Rome’s war of the sexes makes relationships a battlefield

The InterNations Friday night aperitivo at the Radisson Blu was a major gathering of Rome's beautiful people.

Every morning I wake up to see a map of Italy hanging from my closet door. After living here a year and witnessing the fractured relationships between men and women, I now understand why the Italian mainland is shaped like a boot. It’s actually a woman’s thigh-high leather stiletto and the island of Sicily it appears to be kicking is a man’s testicle.

Italy has a vicious war of the sexes. In Rome it is especially savage. The modern Roman woman has transformed from a stay-at-home cook and mother into an independent, career woman in need of a man about as much as a poodle. Most men are stuck in the early 20th century. In a woman, they want a cook, a mistress and a barista. She must look especially hot when making him that morning cappuccino.

Here in Rome I have many friends, both male and female, and have been fascinated by the sexual dynamics in one of the world’s sexiest cities.
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One-year anniversary in Rome reminds me of all the reasons I love living here

Today is my one-year anniversary in Rome and I know I won't have any problems eating well to celebrate.

One year ago today I landed in Rome, a roller bag in hand, a duffel bag and backpack draped over my shoulders and a boarding pass from a one-way ticket in my pocket. Today marks my one-year anniversary of retiring to Rome and it has simply been the most amazing adventure in a life full of them. After 94 countries, I finally found the one I want to live in the rest of my life. Yes, I know I ranted in my blog two weeks ago (https://johnhendersontravel.com/2014/12/31/public-services-make-italy-resemble-a-third-world-coumtry/ that some of the more advanced tribes in the Amazon Rain Forest have better public services than Italy. Look, I’m a retired sportswriter. I have to practice my whining.

But the positives of this culture far outweigh the bad. Living in Rome and putting up with its public services is like living with Kate Upton and putting up with her eating Clif Bars in bed.
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Piazza del Popolo light show an urban artist’s magnificent landscape

Spaceman II

I went to a spectacular show called “Luce — Diversita e’ Energia” (Light — Diversity is Energy). Every year at this time, a group of young urban artists from around the world gather and produce a light show. Tuesday’s theme was their own interpretation of popular language. You could tell by the artists’ names that their interpretations would be somewhere in the vicinity of Pluto. There was Jblock, HALO HALO, Teddy Killer and, my favorite and no doubt soon to become a household name, USELESS IDEA. They held it in Piazza del Popolo, a massive piazza designed in 1538. Still standing on the north end is a massive gate called the Porta del Popolo. Until the railway arrived, this gate was visitors’ first view of Rome upon arrival. In the center is a 120-foot-tall obelisk brought to ancient Rome from Egypt and which once stood in Circus Maximus, sight of Ancient Rome’s chariot races. They held public beheadings here until 1826 on behalf of one of the most ruthless forces in world history.
The Catholic Church.
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Public services make Italy resemble a Third World country

Me Wednesday at the In Caffe where I wrote while dressed more appropriately for a football game in Buffalo.

I am here because in Italy’s never-ending quest to become the most backward industrialized country in the world, my Internet shut off Monday night. I had finished a phone interview, and my laptop screen just zapped. No warning. No explanation. Nothing. Just SNAP! Gone. On my screen appeared vague instructions to type my name in a little box, an act that produced nothing but my expanding vocabulary in Italian profanity. I called Roberto, my advisor in the WIND Internet office, as he readied to lock his office door. He looked up my account. It said I hadn’t paid my bill.

Huh? My records showed I paid my bill in November. So the next day I crossed the Tiber River to the WIND office near the Vatican and Roberto looked at my account again. Yes, I paid my November bill. I didn’t pay my August bill. I never GOT a bill. Even if I did, why didn’t they warn me? Send me an email? Send me a text on my cell phone it also provides? Roberto laughed with open arms in that Italian way that pretty much says, “My friend! This is Italy!”
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Mercato Testaccio near Rome’s old slaughterhouse can make a bad cook into a good cook

Alessandro holds stuffed ravioli in one of the 100-plus stalls in Rome's Mercato Testaccio.

Shopping in Italy is different. The food here is so fresh and so natural, I shop in the Mercato Testaccio every day for what I’ll eat that day. Supermarkets are safety nets in case I can’t make the market before it boards up at 1:30 p.m. My local supermarket looks like something out of rural Eastern Europe in the ‘60s. Dingy lighting with dodgy meat wrapped in cellophane and random cheap boxed goods stacked on dusty shelves. I figure if I don’t make my market by 1:30, I’ll eat like a peasant.

Mercato Testaccio is worth every ounce of sweat to arrive on time. I have my usual routine. It’s a circuitous route among the 100-plus stalls that begin with cheap clothes and household goods on one end and goes to fresh produce and meat on the other. In the middle sits a thriving coffee bar where neighborhood women gossip over foamy cappuccinos, a half dozen brown plastic food bags at their feet.
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Umbria’s eight-course meal stretches the boundaries of gastro excellence, not to mention waistlines

The pappardelle cinghiale, the sixth of an eight-course meal at Quintana Restaurant.

In 2007 a real popular book about healthy eating came out called “Why French Women Don’t Get Fat.” Someone could easily write one today entitled “Why Italians Don’t Get Fat.” And they don’t, regardless of what you believe or see on goofy TV shows or the streets of New Jersey. Only a third of Italians are overweight, half that of the United States. Here’s the reason in one sentence: They eat healthy food in smaller portions and walk instead of drive.

With one meal in Umbria, some friends and I blew that theory right into the Adriatic Sea.
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Why do we get headaches drinking wine in the U.S. and not in Italy?

Benny Rossi of Il Podere del Falco winery outside Rome says U.S. wines cause headaches when winemakers don't have confidence and add too many sulfites.

Today marks my 11-month anniversary back in Rome. That same sized Excedrin bottle a friend brought me last spring (I should’ve asked for a couple of those sample sizes from 7-Eleven) has barely been dented. Most were inhaled two months ago during nine days spent in an alcoholic fog in Mexico. It begs the time-honored question, one I’ve asked ever since I was old enough to buy a drink and mature enough to use a passport.

Why don’t Italian wines give me a headache while wines in the U.S. send me screaming to pharmacies?
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