Back with the cranky cashiers and the street life

Seattle Times Travel editor Terry Tazioli is off to Rome for a while, on his annual quest for good food, good wine, good friends and a new Italian verb form or two.

I spent most of my first day in Rome buying tickets for trains and buses; stopping by the language school where I've studied Italian every year for a while to pay my bill in advance for this summer's lessons (it makes me study harder knowing how much I've already spent); popping in to see a couple of my many-year acquaintances; and making sure the cashiers at the Despar mini-supermarket, down the street from where I'm staying in the historic heart of Rome, are still their happy, surly, weird selves.

They are.

Despar is an ubiquitous chain where, should you be heathen enough to show up without exact change, you earn a withering glance and a shove of your money right back at you. It happens pretty much every single time. A friend of mine and I call it the Supermarket of Despair, and only go to antagonize the help with, say, a 50-euro bill for a 10-euro purchase. (Yes, we're going straight to hell. We already know that.)

By late afternoon, I couldn't think of anything better than sitting at an outdoor cafe with an ice-cold beer and an assortment of olives, chips, tiny pizzas — nearly all served gratis.

Now it's 9:30 p.m. and I'm ready to go out and enjoy the warm Roman night. Just a few streets away, for example, they're holding the Miss Rome pageant outdoors in Piazza San Lorenzo in Lucina, although this morning none of the construction workers building the stage seemed to know what was about to happen, but they knew it involved women! I need to see this, mostly because the Italian government apparently has bent its rules one time only to allow betting on who will win Miss Italia, where the winner of this pageant is headed. This could pay for my trip.