ROME ORIENT FESTIVAL

I live only one hour away from Rome but I'm usually too lazy to attend any cool thing happening there. Yesterday, however, a Orient Festival was taking place and me and my friend Linda - yup, same name and yup, it get embarrassing sometimes - decided to bite the bullet, jump on a train and see what it was about.

Let me say it was amazing. There were tents everywhere, carpets, asian food restaurants, martial arts demonstrations and loads of different stands. You could get a massage, try Yoga in the air or buy a Kimono, a golden elephant or a Buddah. There were Indian and belly dancers performing as well as fortune tellers, henna tattoo artists - red henna, as the Indian tradition wants - and people who said they could take a picture of your aura - 15 bucks for that, no thanks!-.
Everything was pretty magical.

We wandered around a bit, then stopped for lunch in a beautiful Moroccan restaurant called Aisha. I had thai chicken with potatoes, which was delicious, Linda instead went for meat cous cous - which was good (we shared) if you don't get bored of cous cous plain taste like I do - and we got the chance to sit under this beautiful brocade tent, with baroque cushions and octagonal wooden table, which was the best thing as I was feeling very Carrie Bradshaw in Sex & The City The Movie 2!
We also had some Moroccan treats: they were like fried cinnamon bread covered in sugar. Mouth. Watering.

We then went for a bit of shopping. Linda bought some incense and these weird trousers you could wear also as a t-shirt or a jumpsuit, while I picked up just a bag of loose Chai tea (my fave!).
But it was time for us to challenge ourselves a little bit, so we took part in a lesson of 'Laughing Yoga', which is basically based on the fact that our brain can not tell the difference between a real or a fake laugh, so if you spend half an hour pretending you're happy, you'll get happy eventually. It was very weird, we had to run in circles laughing in the oddest way and keeping eye contact with people we've just met, to activate our mirror-neurons or something. Primarily I felt very uncomfortable but then I started having fun and in the end I was very relaxed and had a big smile on my face!

Next stop was the Go stand. Go is a kinda board game, apparently, and a guy there offered to teach us how to play. It looks a bit like chess, but you can't move your pieces - which are called stones - and you need to conquer territories.
Actually, I have no idea how to play.
But it was... um.... interesting.

My favorite part was the tea, though. I am a massive tea drinker so when I saw a stand called Tea & Coffe House I had a little happiness dance around and then went straight into sniffing all those loose teas stored into pretty jars. To be honest, this stand hadn't anything to do with Orient, as it's an Italian brand, but it was the only one that was selling tea to drink atm, so I'm justified if I spent my money there. Not to mention their teas had names like 'Secret drink of the Elves' or 'Tropical cocktail'. I had a gorgeous black tea with flowers and fruit called 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' while Linda went for 'Walnuts and Chocolate Biscuits' that tasted like chocolate -duh- orange and almonds.
The tea was so good we actually went back for another one, this time Linda had an apple and cinnamon infuse called 'Little Red Riding Hood' and I chose the most amazing tea ever. Its name is 'Gingerbread house' and it's an unique mixture of candied fruit, baked apples, raisins, cinnamon and even caramelized pop corns. Christmas in a cup, if you ask me.

Overall this day was amazing, we experienced so many different things and had a blast while doing it. I'm so happy I spent the first day of June this way because it's exactly how I want my summer to be: funny, interesting, unusual and slightly incense scented!