When in Rome...

The past few weeks have been crazy busy, so now I finally have time to continue my journey of blogging my Europe trip.

Colosseum by Day...

We have finally made it to Rome! We only planned to spend 3 days there, hit up the main sites, and move on, for several reasons. First, Rome is expensive, and this trip was intended not to break the bank. Second, Rome is HOT! in the summer, and me and extreme heat don't always see eye to eye. Third, Rome is crowded with tourists in the Summer. Although we would be considered tourists, I like to believe Cath and I are a different kind of tourist. Tourists drive me crazy! We like to go off the beaten track and try to live like the Romans do, but that's hard to do when the streets are crowded with photo-crazy groups of people.

Colosseum by Night...

We didn't realize how long it would take us to get from Croatia to Rome, so we ended up losing a day from travelling. We took a ferry from Dubrovnik Croatia to Bari Italy, and then had to run from the ferry terminal, grab a cab, and race to the train station to catch our overnight train (which we didn't have reservations for yet). It felt just like The Amazing Race! We made sure to be at the front of the line of ferry passengers and ran off that ferry with our backpacks as soon as the ferry employees would let us.

It was in Bari that we ran into our first issues with all the financial crises going on in Europe. Roads were blocked off by police, and journalists with camera crews were everywhere. Our cab had to take the long way around to get us to the train station. We managed to get on the train just in time before it left. Our train was just a small cabin with seats that reclined a little bit, so it was a bit of an uncomfortable night. Plus, there was one of the most smelliest men ever in our cabin. Cath and I both had to cover our faces with sweaters to muffle the smell. Ugh!!

We arrived in Rome at 6am, then went straight to the hostel we had booked to get a bit of sleep. There was a little drama involved in this that was frustrating, but it would take a while to tell the story, which is more annoying than interesting anyways :). We slept for a few hours, took showers, then went out to explore a bit.

With only 2 full days in Rome, we saw the main sites like the Colosseum, the Forum, and the Vatican City, the Spanish Steps, the Trevi Fountain, and our usual wandering the streets. We also made sure to get our fill of Italian eats and delicious Gelato!! Yumm!!

Pizza!

The only thing we didn't get to see that we had hoped to was the Catacombs, but there is a reason for that which I will get to...right now. Since Rome is hot in the summer, we were recommended by someone to check out the Catacombs in the afternoon at the heat of the day. We figured that was a good idea, so on our second afternoon in Rome we jumped on the subway and attempted to navigate our way there. Here's the problem. The subway line that would get us closest was closed that day, so we picked the next closest subway line. Our subway map however did not have streets on it, so we had to combine the subway map with another map we had of the city. The problem with this other map was that the catacombs were not clearly on it, actually I don't think they were even on the map, and the map only had main streets. It was intended for tourists who would go to the main sites and stick to main areas, but we are wanderers. Anyways, we ended up getting hopelessly lost because none of the streets were on our map. We walked for so long and couldn't find it. We ended up going into a local hair salon to ask for directions, and they pointed us where to go. We ended up close, we knew we were close because we saw a group of Asian tourists, but we were too late, they were already closed. So we ended up just going all the way back to the subway and returning to the main part of the city. The one good thing that came out of this excursion, besides character, was the best gelato we have ever had. The gelato places in the tourist centers make it to be more like ice cream, but this place was in a random neighbourhood and its gelato was legit. It was made with real fruit and they had so many delicious flavours. Fantastic!

 The Vatican City was another good story. I'll keep it short since this is getting long. A lot of vendors try to sell tours of the Vatican  and St. Peter's Basilica. They all claim to give the best rates and have the best guides with the best English and that you can skip the 2-hour long lines. We're not much of tour people since we like to go at a faster pace than large groups and we don't like being stuffed with historical information about everything. If we want to know something, we'll look it up for ourselves. Anyways, I used it as an opportunity to barter a little bit. The first tour said they would charge 40 Euro. After talking to several others to see if they could beat each other's prices, I talked someone down to 20 Euro. When I tried to get it even lower, one girl got angry at me and stormed off. So, word of advice, if you want a tour of the Vatican, don't settle for anything more than 20 Euro. They're ripping you off for more commission. But, to save even more, don't take a tour. The line-ups were not 2 hours long. I think the longest we waited was 30 minutes, at the peak time in season.

Next we head off to one of the most beautiful places I have ever been, and one of my new favourite places in Europe...Cinque Terre, Italy!