European Vacation: Rats

I am home from Europe where I had many adventures and caught a disgusting hacking feverish yellow phlegmy cold. I'm just going to post little bits of the trip at random and will try to put some pictures up, too. The first little bit is below:

In Rome we stayed in a hotel across the street from some ruins where kitties live on a diet of rats and leftover spaghetti. The hotel room was a bit musty and I went to open the window. Unlike in the US, they let you open the hotel windows all the way in Europe.

By "they" I mean people who are not my cousin B. "Don't open that window!" he yelled at me.

"Why?" I asked.

"Because rats will crawl in!" he replied.

I took the name of the Lord in vain and then offered a compromise: I would open the window for five minutes, so the room could air out, and would keep my eyes on it at all times.

"OK fine but if any rats crawl in you have to kill them by biting off their heads," said cousin B.

"No problem," said I. Then I opened the window and remarked on how many other windows in the airshaft we faced were open. But still, after five minutes I closed the window. Later we turned on the air conditioner and it smelled like urine. Cousin B said the smell came from angry rats climbing up five stories so they could hop on the air conditioner and pee all over it, out of sheer rattiness.