Ciao Roma

Italy was AMAZING, and has definitely been my favorite place so far. We arrived in the port of Civitavecchia, which is about an hour train ride to Rome, the morning of July 1. We disembarked the ship with all of our bags, and soon realized we had NO IDEA where the train station was…oopstini. We were with a group of about 20 SASers (pronounced “sassers”) all heavily laden with baggage as well. After finding our way out of the port, is was about a 10-minute walk to the train station and we caught the 10:41 AM train to Termini Station, Roma. The train was PACKED with SASers, and I didn’t have a seat and had to stand for most of the hour train into Rome. When we got to Rome we navigated the seedy area around the train station to our hostel, 5 of us were going to stay there (Hannah, Caroline, Camille, and Isabel). We found it to be on the 3rd story of an unmarked apartment looking building. The lady who ran it was NOT friendly, and the whole place stank. In this tiny room were 4 single beds and a double crammed in all with mismatching covers, and some other assorted furniture haphazardly thrown around, and the kicker: no air conditioning. Needless to say we were all a little freaked/uncomfortable, but tried to make the best out of the situation.

After we put our bags down we decided to go have lunch and begin sightseeing. Camille and I had been to Rome before so we wanted to see a little bit different things than the 1st timers (Carol, Hannah, Izzie)—but we wanted to start the day out together. We went back to Termini and bought a bus ticket to Piazza Venezia, and had lunch at the cutest little sidewalk café. The waiters LOVED us, and we LOVED the food. We ordered a bunch of Caprese Salads and delicious pizza and had some wine. When we told the waiters we were from the US, they started chanting “VIVA OBAMA,” and when we told them we were from Texas, this little man, Miguele who is definitely not over 5’3”, cocked his hands and pretending to be shooting guns and yelled “COWBOYS, BANG BANG.” We all started laughing hysterically.

After lunch we headed to Capitoline Hill and checked out the Capitoline Museum. On Capitoline Hill is a copy of the statue of Marcus Aurelius, an old Roman Emperor, riding a horse. It is the only statue from the Roman Republic that survives today, the only reason that it survives is because the Romans thought it was Constantine, and not Marcus Aurelius. Anyway, the museum was pretty neat, lots of sculpture and paintings from the entire history of the Romans, from ancient times up to Renaissance and Baroque. The security guards at the museum despise me though, bc when I was taking pictures inside, I would turn my camera off in between and when I turned the cam back on to snap another pic the flash would automatically turn back on and the ladies who sat guard at all the rooms yelled at me in Italian for like 5min straight, I kept apologizing over and over again and trying to tell them that I DID NOT UNDERSTAND her chastising me in Italian, oh well, I’m sure I added some excitement to their otherwise boring days, hah.

We then headed to the Roman Forum, which is behind Capitoline Hill and walked around and snapped some pics, then went to the Colosseum and walked around but didn’t go inside. Caroline and Hannah wanted to go to the Colosseum before the rest of us were finished in the museum, so I had some trouble meeting up with them but we finally reconnected right in front of Marcus Aurelius! By this time huge storm clouds had rolled in and it started pouring rain. We were trapped in the square on Capitoline Hill for abt 15 min, and we tried to formulate our next move. Unbeknownst to me, Hannah had talked to Leslie about our sub-par hostel accommodations and Leslie found us a room at the Hotel Valadier, right off of Piazza del Popolo. We ducked into a little Trattoria and had a cappuccino to perk us up after the rain and traveling to Rome we were all a little tired. After our coffee we decided to go back to our hostel, grab our bags and then make our way across town to our new and improved hotel! While we were deciding if we were going to hail a cab or try our luck with the public bus system we saw this HUGE protest making its way toward us down this little alley. DUH, all of us were deeply intrigued, but failed to make out what their signs said in Italian, so we decided to walk with them a little ways until we figured out how we were going to get back to the hostel. All 3 of us were amused that this protest had police escort of about 20 cops in full riot gear in front of them, kind of leading the way, and also behind them. Obviously this protest was planned, later we deduced it was something having to do with welfare, anyway we jumped in a cab after the cops started shooing us away from Hannah kept insisting on taking pictures with them.

When we got back to the hostel our landlady was pretty hostile, we had trouble opening the door to our room, and then with all of our bags proceeded to get stuck in the tiny elevator on the way back down, we were so excited to get out of there. We heard about this “Spanish Steps pub crawl,” that takes you to lots of bars and you pay ahead of time and get free drinks everywhere, so we were trying to reach our hotel in time to get ready and be at the Spanish Steps by 9 PM (at this point it is 8 PM, we need to figure out how to get across town, get dinner, and shower). We are trying to move as fast as possible so I suggested that we take the Metro instead of a cab bc it would probably be quicker. Once we walked the few blocks back to the train station we realized we had no idea how to buy a metro ticket. We ran around the station for abt 20 minutes looking like chickens with our heads cut off before we finally asked a some sort of security guard and he told us we could buy them at any magazine stand. We raced to the nearest magazine stand and bought the 11E 3 day unlimited public transportation pass (or so we thought..more on that later), and hoofed it 3 stops on the A line to the Piazza del Popolo. Now its 8:30 and we are having doubts that we are going to make it to the pub-crawl on time, we check into our hotel, Hotel Valadier, and have dinner at a little sidewalk café outside of the hotel. I ordered this AWESOME cream pesto pasta and Hannah and Carol got really tasty dishes too. Then we went up to our room, 512 on the 6th floor and got ready to go out.

The room turned out to be PERFECT, it was so nice, we had a little balcony that overlooked the street, the bathroom was huge with 2 sinks and lots of mirror space, and the shower faucet came like directly down from the ceiling and had lime green tile, it was great. After we got ready we got a bottle of wine to our room and engaged in a lengthy talk about religion and afterlife, nope I’m not kidding. Then we met up with everyone at this bar in the Campo de’Fiori, it was fun! But the best part of the night was when we got back at like 3 AM there was a full fledged after party going down in the piano lounge of our hotel. It was all locals. There were 2 pianos and the guys playing were singing all these songs in Italian and the bar was PACKED with people dancing and singing along, it was so FUN. Of course we didn’t know the songs bc they were in Italian, but we made a lot of friends and danced for a while! A great end to the day!