the far side of the moon

I was just looking at my travel journal and I remembered this one night in Rome that Krysten and I laughed so hard we cried, and I'm certain, bothered our neighbors. (Sadly, they were not the Swedish teenagers that stayed in our hallway in Florence, but that's another story for another time.)

We were home from dinner, full and let's be honest- a bit tipsy, and lying on our respective beds with our feet propped up on the headboard, discussing various things about life, and for some reason, I thought it a good time to wonder, "if the same side of the moon always faces the earth, do the people on the other side of the earth see the other side of the moon?" We talked about this for a long while, and made lots of "planets" with our hands and tried to spin and rotate around one another in the most discombobulated of manners, and then the following interchange occurred:

Krysten: hey, maybe we should go outside and see if it looks different!
Jamie: we're only like, 7 time zones away-- it's not really the opposite side of the planet.
Krysten: well won't we be able to tell if it looks a little different?
Jamie: do you have the surface of the moon memorized? anyway, it's only a crescent right now.
Krysten: I hate Rome.

I. laughed. so. hard. I think I almost choked. The answer is no, btw. We looked it up.

We then went on to discuss time zones and that place in the world where it was suddenly like a whole day different, and how it would be really inconvenient to say, make a lunch date for Tuesday and then accidentally cross the line and get stood up on Wednesday, and then she pointedly told me that that place (much later remembered as the "International Date Line") was probably in the middle of the ocean. More hand motions, more laughing, more tears, more choking.

I'm glad I have a friend who likes similar topics of conversation as I do, and also shares my sense of humour. I'd also like to extend thanks to Wikapedia, who answered so many of our questions that week, and also gave us the suggestion to wash our feet in the bidet (which despite only being in Italy, are named after the French word for "pony." Ew.)