A Crash Course in ...Italy?
Rome: Day 1
Again, to make this simpler, I am going to break this down into the actual days that the events happened, rather than one huge blog entry...
...My sanity thanks you for your help in this matter.
The day began at 8am with both my iPod and cell phone alarms singing in discord. I’m finding this to be one of the more deadly cocktails of alarms: it’s very annoying, and impossible to ignore.
Jess and I finished packing, and to simplify things decided to take a taxi to the airport as it was raining. Upon arrival we had to determine where exactly to check-in. Since we were early they only had one window that was open, and was also part of another line for another flight. We patiently waited, received our boarding passes, and headed toward passport control.
This would probably be a good time to explain something about countries in the EU, and specifically something about the way the Czech’s do it... If your flying out of the Schengen area you need to leave from terminal 1, but within EU countries it’s terminal 2. The security is done differently, customs is conducted differently, and so is passport control. Thus we passed thru a very relaxed passport control and then onto the security checkpoint immediately thereafter. If we were leaving the Schengen area, the security is much more serious. Passport control is behind bullet-proof glass, they run all your information thru the computer, stamp your passport, and then you go thru security at the gate waiting area, rather than just at the entrance to the terminal.
Anyways we passed thru passport control and I managed to NOT have my film run thru the x-ray scanners. We walked to the gate, stopping at a store along the way to pick up some cookies, Pringles, and most importantly: a map of Rome.
The flight to Rome was uneventful. They served a snack of a tomato and mozzarella pastry thing, a strange salad swimming in oil, and a chocolate-like snack-cookie-bar.
Now came the fun part... not really. It took 45 minutes for us to get our luggage from baggage claim, 45 minutes to wait for the shuttle we decided to hire to take us to the hotel, and 45 minutes to get to the hotel. By the time we arrived it was too late to do anything in terms of tours, so we just checked into the hotel and took a walk to St. Peter’s Basilica. The courtyard is amazing. It seems like you could fit half a million people into the square (even though it’s a circle, I think they still call it St. Peter’s Square).
We wandered around until we found a place to eat dinner. We ate outside under the umbrellas, which was a good thing because it started to pour. I had pizza, and Jess pasta, that tasted more like candy than pasta. There was a pretty funny incident that happened at dinner with an older woman trying to park her car... She kept running into the bushes, and knocking them over. She had to have done it 4 or 5 times before the wait staff at the restaurant decided to carefully guide her in... Guess they don’t know how to drive in Rome either.
After dinner we walked back toward the hotel, and made a few stops up and down the main street with all the European clothing stores. I tried on a sweater, but after discovering it cost 130 euros, I decided to take it off.
We got back to the hotel and planned the attack of the next day... We were going to see almost everything we wanted to in one day... Exhausted by the idea alone, we crashed.