Once Upon a Meatball.: Roma Termini

Week on hold #2: Roma.

Gabrielle and I were placed on hold together so we decided to do some sightseeing. We took the slow train from Firenze a Roma Termini because it was less expensive, but it was a bit of a pain -- constantly moving our bags, and it took at least 2 hours longer than Eurostar would have taken us.

After we arrived in Rome, we walked to our hostel, but Gabrielle said that she got a bad feeling about it, so we left to find an internet cafe' to look for somewhere else to stay. You would think that internet would be easy to find in a Rome train station, but it wasn't. We tried asking a few people, but they couldn't understand what we were talking about, even though "internet" is the same word in Italian as it is in English.

After a few hours in the deadly heat with all of out luggage, we finally got a room at the Two Ducks hostel. I had just bought a new suitcase the day before because the zipper had broken on my other one, and as we were walking to the hostel, the wheel on my new one had popped off. Now on the my 4th suitcase this trip.

Our landlord's name was Alberto, and he was the type of guy that constantly wants to kid around. He would always hide the keys from us and randomly pop in to say hello. A bit creepy, but fun.

Two of Gabrielle's friends, Susan and Emma, were travelling to Rome and ended up staying in our room at the hostel. We also had some random Korean-looking Russian boy named Bolot who stayed in the bunk above me. He was a bit strange, but entertaining. He was backpacking through Europe alone before going back to school. He did some odd things like locking the room door when he went to the bathroom & we were still inside, offering me his juice right out of the box, asking me what time it was even though he clearly had a phone, and always kissing my hand. But he was cool and didn't cause any trouble.

During the week we visited the Colosseum (which wasn't as impressive as we had imagined), the Vatican, St. Peter's Basilica, and the Trevi Fountain. All were beautiful, but the heat was unbearable every day. We would be sitting inside and sweat would be dripping off of our faces. Even after a shower we would immediately sweat again.

During the nights we would visit different pubs and bars. There was one near our hostel where we became good friends with the waiter Mario - he had large afro-ish hair, loved Dublin, and we got the feeling that he could very possibly be a drug dealer. We also did a bar crawl one night and got to see some of the night life along the river.

Our last night in Rome was a wild one with out 1 euro bottles of wine ~ we met up with Emma's cousin who was working in Italy as a pilot and hung out with him all night. We were zombies the next morning for out train ride (2hours of sleep). I ended up leaving my 2 empty suitcases in the hostel along with some clothes that didn't fit in my new suitcase. Sorry to the woman who had to clean that up, but we would have been late for our train.

Long train ride up to Calcio (near Bergamo), but anywhere up north would be fresher than the terrible heat in Rome.