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Published: November 10th 2008
Getting To Rome
Thursday morning we woke up in anticipation for a pleasant three day journey. Destination, Rome. The good thing about Europe is, traveling around is relatively convenient. For example, there are no major oceans (or any other large bodies of water for that matter) that you must travel over to get to where you are going. A two hour flight, and a couple of short train rides, and we were basically there. It was actually kind of funny to me how easy it was to get there. I love traveling, because there are so many unexpected events that take place when you are going to an unfamiliar place. You never know what to expect. There's always that first impression of a new city. Regardless if it's good or bad, it always ends up changing for me. For example, when we first hit the street in Rome, the first thing we saw was the Pyramid. There is a picture of it on this page. I said "Wow look at that" and it was pretty cool, right? It got us by surprise. Two minutes later, as we were walking down the street; I started to not care for the city
so much. It was a little dirty, loud, and confusing. I couldn't believe how impatient drivers are. I thought Americans were bad. If someone is stopped in the street, waiting to make a left turn, and they're holding up some of the traffic, the other cars would hold their horns and not stop until the car moved. It was very annoying. We kept saying to each other, "what do they expect the car to do, just ram into the oncoming traffic so they don’t upset the driver behind them?"Crazy people....
Then, eventually over the course of the next few hours, when I started to see the finer aspects, I started to enjoy the city all over again, of course. Traveling is like a scale with constant movement between
good and
bad. There will always be annoying things about it.
The First Night
Day 1 - We first checked into our booked room, of course. The hotel
Hotel Pyramid was a “nice little place” as I would say, and many other Mainers I know would say. It was a two star hotel about a 5 minute walk from one of the metro stations, so it wasn't away from
the city a huge distance. It was nice and close for us to use as a base point to tour the city the way we wanted to. After we checked in and got ourselves situated, we hopped back on the subway to go see the first tourist attraction.
The Colosseo was an A+ in my book. Lucky for us, the metro rail came out literally right in front of it. So, we could start seeing a little bit of it before we even hit the street. Like a slap in the face. “Boom”, as I would say. There it was, a stunning sight. So, we snapped off a few pictures, one (that I posted) being a night shot that I particularly like.
The Colosseo was definitely amazing, and is definitely among the top choices of what my favorite sights in Rome were.
That night, we ate at a nice Italian restaurant. I had been quite anxious to try pizza in Italy, so I ordered a pizza with mushrooms. I remember that the menu made me laugh, because they named all of their pizzas, and the one with mushrooms was called the "Fungi". I thought that was a brave
Pyramid
or something rather....thing for the restaurant to name one of their pizzas. Sounds like they would serve athletes foot on a plate or something. Anyway, regardless of the awkward name, the pizza was excellent. The pizza in the United States is a lot different, not only to the pizza in Italy, but other pizza I have tried in Europe as well. I have noticed that most of the pizza over here has thin crust. Not those thick crusts like you get at "Pizza Hut" or "Dominos". Also, they're not as big as we are on pizza sauce. Americans can't get enough pizza sauce. And the proof of this is some pizza places serve marinara on the side with the pizza...
A Long Tourist Day
Day 2 - The next day was the long day. We got up early, and went downstairs for breakfast. The hotel we were staying at included breakfast for the two days we were there, so that was nice. After breakfast, we set out on foot to travel the city. The subway system ran along the path of most of the tourist attractions. So, we could conveniently take a 5 minute trip to get to and from
Awesome Pic
Dark clouds in background a lot of the sights. First, we went to the
Giardini del Vaticano,
"The Vatican". I was bound and determined to visit the place that is on that movie Eurotrip. Again, amazing architecture was all around. The building designs were amazing. I think that this location was the most populated of all of the tourist attraction areas. People came to us, trying to lure us on to guided tours. Most of them were quite expensive, so we didn’t do it. But yes,
The Vatican was definitely worth seeing.
After we left, we walked through the city
to and
from a lot of the touristy areas, and saw a lot of the city; Anything from the
Castel Sant’ Angelo, to the
Monumento a Vittorio Emanuele II, to the
Arco di Tito. All of the buildings and sights we visited were amazing. It was like one great view after another. At one point, we stopped to get some food at a McDonalds, and while we were eating it started raining really hard. Hard enough to keep us at the restaurant. Plus, I had sandals on. Good thing it wasn’t socks and sandals, or I would really have been shit out of
luck. Yeah, that’s right, I said socks and sandals. I don’t care, I wear them. I don’t care how much I get teased, I like socks and sandals. Anyway, once the rain let up we walked again, but we got caught up in it on and off for about 45 minutes, which wasn't so bad. We dealt with it.
Eventually, we got tired of walking. We had done about 4-5 hours at this point, so we took a break at the hotel for a bit. A little while later, we left again for some night time tourist action. Although pictures were a no go, we saw a couple more nice parts of the city, including the
Fontana del Tritone, and
Piazza del Popolo. Then we went out to another restaurant. The funny thing about it was I happened to have another pizza craving. And, on top of that, I was in the mood for some more mushrooms. I don’t know what it is; I've been on this mushroom kick lately. Anyway, on the menu, they had a pizza with Porcini Mushrooms. I had never had Porcinis, so I tried it. I have to say, those mushrooms were good, but
View of City
From Monumento a Vittorio Emanuele II they were very flavorful. The flavor was almost a little rich, but was very delicious. Again, it was different from the pizza back home. This one didn't even have pizza sauce. It looked like they put some sort of white creamy sauce on it, with the cheese. It's funny actually, because I was thinking about how stupid I was to order the same type of thing two nights in a row. But, I have to say, both of those pizzas were very different from one another. So, it wasn't an unjust cause.
Last Day
Day 3 - I think Sunday was the best for me. We walked through the inner part of the city for about four hours. Even though we had seen a lot on Saturday, there were still a lot of areas we had yet to cover. Again, a couple times on this day, we sort of stumbled upon some great views that we weren’t necessarily expecting. We saw the
Fontana di Trevi, the
Piazza Colonna, and the
Palazzo Montecitorio. Toward the end of the afternoon, we somehow found ourselves on a street that was completely packed with people. Few cars were trying to get by.
Sandra
Next to Sandra sized car The street was pretty much unaccessable unless you were on foot. This seemed to be an expensive shopping location. There were lots of stores on the street that people were coming in and out of. Sandra looked around, because, she’s a girl. That’s what girls do, they shop. It was alright though, because by this time I was in enough pain from walking around that I didn't mind stopping for her to browse. Anyway, the night before, we had gone to
Piazza del Popolo, and saw that a stage had been set up. Someone told us that on Sunday night, an orchestra would be playing at 7pm. This shopping street we were on that was crowded, ran directly toward where the orchestra was. I think that had a little bit to do with reasoning for the large crowds. This was well before 7pm, but they were doing rehearsal, so we got to sit and enjoy the music for a minute. However, our flight was set to leave at 5pm so we couldn’t stick around too much longer.
Returning To Germany
The same subway / airport routine was used to get back home, as it was used to get
to Rome. However, the trip back seemed a bit longer, and a bit more grueling. The returning trips always do. I wonder why that is? Well, in this case, it might of had something to do with the
gimp left leg that I had as a direct result of walking around a city for 3 days, after skating on Wednesday and hurting myself. Or maybe, it was how we got
screwed over on the last train ride, had to get off and switch trains, and had to pay double what we should of, when the train company is the one that made the mistake. Possibly, it could have been the
one and a half hour delay on our flight back to Germany. Plus, you have to figure, we were already
cranky because of how stressful the different aspects of traveling can be. Yes sir, the trip back was good, but not really. But hey, that’s how it is. Traveling probably wouldn't even be fun if there were no unexpected turns. It was still worth going, there’s no doubt about that. Rome is not the kind of city I would want to live in, but definitely worth a visit, and a
Sandra
In the Restaurant return visit should the opportunity ever present itself.
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