First day in Rome (Becky)

We caught the train from Ventimiglia to Rome, and it turned out to work perfectly to get us into Rome in the early morning. The train was an adventure – our second class seats were in small rooms like the trains in Morocco, such that you end up with 6 people in a room, 3 facing the other 3. No foot room, nowhere to direct your eyes, and unbelievable awkwardness. I deeply dislike whoever developed this mode of transit. Anyway, Jeremy slept for a while, and I slept for maybe 2 hours before we pulled into the enormous Roma Termini station. From there, we wandered without a map roughly in the direction that we thought went to the coliseum but didn’t (this may have been the first time in the trip that Jeremy was wrong about directions and I was right, so I would like to point it out and gloat a bit). We went to a small park at the north of the city, then worked our way back past to the Roman ruins and coliseum, killing enough time with sightseeing, crossword puzzles, and breakfast that we could then check into our hostel.

Our hostel was more like an apartment, with the two bedrooms loaded with 10 beds, only one bathroom, and the dining/kitchen area arranged with a small couch where our hosts slept. Our hosts overbooked the room, and it momentarily looked like we would have nowhere to sleep. Then we agreed to a cheaper rate to share a twin bed, and eventually we ended up having our own beds anyway and saving some money. Hurray. Once everything was sorted out, we made the box of Kraft mac and cheese that I had brought from home (using a Laughing Cow cheese instead of butter, which turned out ok but with cheese chunks), watched music videos, and napped for the afternoon.

In the evening we headed back out to wander past the Roman sites. In the ruins of the Roman Fora, Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar was being acted out for a small paying crowd. Yet you could watch for free from the walkway above the ruins, so we enjoyed that until our lack of understanding of the Italian language got us frustrated and we moved on. We tried to find the fabled Italian Discotheque scene, but failed miserably and wound up at a neighborhood Indian restaurant.. which closed 10 minutes after we bought a beer. The guys at the bar, who seemed to be regulars, invited us in broken English to stand outside the bar with them to finish our beer, so we did. They were an amusing bunch. An older man with maybe 8 teeth left in his mouth kept dancing, making jokes in Italian, and laughing heartily. Another man spoke some English, asked about where we were from, and gave us a lecture on the difference between the Italian language and the “Roman” language, which I think is a dialect/accent of the same Italian language, but I got confused. After that, the city seemed dead, so we headed back to the hostel.