When in Rome... Watch your Belongings

On our way to Rome we made short small stops in Assisi and Orvieta. Our first stop in Assisi was a tiny little town that had small narrow streets and cute homes lining the sidewalks. We went to the duomo where we saw a man in an outfit of what looked like potato sack material standing barefoot on the corner. He smiled and waved. We all stayed and sketched the front of the duomo and bell tower when Rod came up to tell me the man who had been standing there before had actually lived in Columbus, IN at one time and had written a book about it! Small world!

We continued on to Orvieta and all got off the coach not sure of where we were and where to go. We all boarded a cable car which took us up to the top of a large hill that the town sat on. We looked around for a while, saw the duomo, and continued back down the hill to keep on our path to Rome.

We arrived in Rome that night with free time to go find dinner. Our hotel was located in the Chinatown district so it took a while to find a place where we could have Italian food. The food was so-so so we decided to try our chances on gelato. We found a place that was having a sale where their largest cup of gelato was only 1.5 euros! The flavors weren't the best we'd had but it was nice for a cheaper dessert.

The next day we started off early walking to the metro with our tour guide for a long day of walking. We visited Vatican City first which was crazy to see how the security worked between Rome and the sacred city. We saw the Vatican Museum which was full of paintings of Raphael and Michelangelo. The Sistine Chapel was amazing in person. Pictures weren't allowed but I don't think it would be able to show what you could see in person anyway.

After leaving Vatican City we went and grabbed a quick lunch before heading to our tour of the colosseum. The tour was great. A lot of the arena was left to be imagined but the scale alone of it was really impressive. There were also skulls of animals that were used in the fights found in the excavation of the building, as well as stone capitals with the inscriptions left on them. It had been built in 9 years which is incredible.

We walked down the road where we entered the Roman Forum which was basically the common place of the city. The archeologists are struggling with the excavation of this site since there are so many important buildings built on top of other important ones they are not sure which to uncover and which need to be left. The tour guide explained to us that Rome has to be very careful about future building plans. Recently they made plans to build a train station where all of the trains meet but a problem they ran into was there are very important artifacts under the site and they had to make the decision to cancel the train station and leave the artifacts for future generations to have. The way she described it is trying to move forward while protecting and remembering the past which was a neat thing to think about.

Visiting the pantheon was amazing to see how massive the building was in person. The giant oculus in the center of the ceiling was almost mesmerizing. It was also crazy to see the burial place of Raphael after seeing all of his amazing works earlier that day.

That night we walked to the Trevi Fountain and threw our coins in before splitting for a nice dinner where we had limoncello and then went for gelato. We found a delicious gelateria that had the best gelato I'd had yet. The owner explained that he made all of the favors with real ingredients and not flavoring. It was clear that he took his store very seriously and was not satisfied unless his customer was as well. I tried the pistachio with dark chocolate and it was the best gelato I had tried yet.

The next day we woke early and went down to breakfast. Halfway through breakfast Les ran in saying we needed to leave early to make our way to our destination for the morning, because the trains were going on strike at the time we planned to board. We ran to the station which was packed full of people trying to make the train before they shut down. We piled in on top of each other trying not get lost in the crowds. I couldn't reach a handrail so I relied on a taller world tour member to hold on to. We finally reached the edge of the train station where we caught a bus for a twenty minute ride out to Tivoli.

In Tivoli we visited Villa Desti, where the gardens are known as the garden of 1000 fountains. Fountains lined the entire place. The sound of water was everywhere and it was beautiful. We sketched a bit and had lunch before catching the bus back and heading to the Spanish steps.

That day we walked around looking in local stores including a quick stop in the Ferrari store. We had a really good dinner that night before heading back to the hotel. Chen my friend on the trip was turning 23 at midnight so a group of us decided to take him out to a nearby club for some birthday dancing and celebration.

The next morning we woke up early and started to load our things onto the coach a few people at a time when Monica came running in saying something was stolen off of the coach and a few of the boys took off after the thief. Rod ran out to find out his bag that had been in the front seat of the coach was gone. We spent an hour visiting the police station and trying to get ahold of people to help replace what we had lost. That morning we all were feeling very disappointed and shared thoughts of "If only I'd been paying more attention maybe I could have...." It has definitely made us all more aware of the security of our things before continuing onto Pompeii for a quick visit.

Pompeii was amazing see since it is so well preserved. They have paintings and frescoes covering their walls and gorgeous mosaic floors because the entire city was buried in poisonous rubble. The roads and most walls were completely in tact. you could even see the chariot wheel indents made over time in the stone pavers. The guide explained it was covered in 4 to 7 meters of rubble after the explosion of the nearby volcano. They had even found the bodies of people who had died in the explosions and were able to make plaster casts of their bodies. It was insane to see how much he casts showed. It was terrible see the expressions on the faces of the people who died excruciating deaths of suffocation. It is neat to have such a well preserved piece of the Roman history.

We left Pompeii ready for a four hour long drive to the ferry where we boarded for an overnight trip to Greece.

Hostel Life

We arrived in Florence after a two hour train ride and walked a few blocks to our hostel where we were given our rooms for six people in each. The walls of the hostel were covered in murals with statues filling the interior. When we went up to the room there were three bunk beds in the room and one bathroom to share.

Rod and Les took us on a short walking tour before letting us go for the night. We walked to the duomo and then split up to go to dinner. A group of us split and went to find a smaller restaurant. We ended up finding a small pizza restaurant where I had a vegetarian pizza with artichoke and mushroom on it. I also had a White Russian to drink with my meal that was pretty delicious as well.

After dinner we all walked to get gelato at a store Rod had pointed out earlier as his favorite. I got pistachio and hazelnut which was very good but extremely cold and cold to eat in the winter here. When we returned to the hostel, my room decided to do laundry all together since you could pay to use the washer and dryer. The six of us decided to do three loads together. We put all of our clothes in the two washers since they were both empty and went upstairs to wait for them to finish.

When we returned downstairs to put the clothes into the two dryers available we realized one was about halfway through a cycle. We thought it was a bit strange that someone was drying clothes without using a washer first but we just ignored it. We waited for the dryer to be finished when an Asian women and her daughter came in to wait for a washer. It was hard to explain why we were not able to move our washed clothes out of the washer into a dryer since one of the dryers was still going with a mystery persons clothes. As soon as the mystery dryer finished the women and girl were on top of us to get our clothes out. We felt bad opening someone's dryer and placing their things on the top of it but we didn't have much of a choice.

Opening up the dryer, I started pulling out the clothes while Kathleen and Hillary cleaned the lint trap. They looked at the trap wondering why it had white dry crusty stuff covering it. After putting the first armful on the dryer top, I looked down to see a pair of dirty underwear had fallen out onto the floor from the load of laundry. We immediately figured it out. Someone had put their clothes in the dryer thinking it was a washer and had put detergent in the lint trap. A girl walked into the room right as we finished pulling all of the warm dirty clothes out and cleaning the trap. She was very confused and didn't understand why someone would have dried her clothes for her. After explaining to her which were dryers and which were washers we felt bad but it was hard to not laugh later about the situation.

We finally got our clothes washed dried and sanitized our hands from touching the dirty laundry and then had to hang most of our newly washed clothes on our portable clothes lines across the room. The room looked like a jungle with bags exploded everywhere on the floor.

The next morning we met with a tour guide to see the city and hear about the Medici family who were the patrons of Michelangelo. We walked around and saw the famous bridge Ponte Vecchio as well as the palace of the family who were rivals of the Medici. The gardens were gorgeous with giant hills that killed to walk up after walking down to the lower parts. That night we all split to do our own things. A group of us were hoping to get to see The statue of David but found out the museum that housed David was closed that day sadly. We decided to climb the highest hill to over look the city and see the duomo. Hillary, Kathleen, Chen, Nick, and I all decided to go climb to the top of the duomo as our friends who went to Italy over the summer highly recommended.

The dome if the duomo is actually two layers and you climb in between the walls to the top. It was so crazy because as you rose in the walls the stairs started getting narrower and narrower which was terrifying. There were 463 stairs to the top and the last leg was almost vertical over the curve of the dome. We made it to the top and took lots of fun pictures before turning around to go down. Looking down the last leg of the stairs we had taken to come up was terrifying! You felt like you could fall forward at any moment. We had a lot of fun together before going to see the stores on the ground, and making our nightly gelato stop.

We had a lot of fun that night walking around and seeing the leather market. We met a man named Arman working in the leather market who had lived all over the world at one time or another. He had resided in Florence for twenty years but seemed like he had a lot of stories to tell and a great outlook on life. He told us of a really good and not extremely expensive restaurant down the street where we could get local food.

As we walked to the restaurant we realized it was closed for the night so we went to a place next with slightly higher prices but man it was worth it! I got my favorite meal of the trip which was a tortellini pasta filled with pears and cheese in a creamy white sauce of some kind. It was so good I think I may crave that pasta for a long time to come. We stayed and talked together a lot at dinner because it is not rushed in Italy. Meals are meant to be slow paced which is hard to do when you have so little time in a city but it can be nice when you do take time.

The next day we went and visited two small hill towns. San Gimignano was our first stop. We got off the bus and started up the hilly streets.

We all went to go find lunch, and since Kathleen, Hillary and I are the slowest sketchers we were last as always. Haha. We walked up the narrow streets getting lost in the little alleys until we found ourselves up so high we were out of the streets. We decided to return back down and on the way we found a really good diner to grab a piece of pizza in.

Our next stop on the road was Siena which is a small hill town known for its horse races in the street every year. The have a giant empty square in the center of the city which is known as the main piece of the race track. It was pretty neat to see all of the small stores along the street. All of them had lots of Italian cooking spices and beautiful scarves hung up in the doorways. We returned to Florence pretty late that night in the middle of a hail storm which was pretty terrifying to listen to while on the bus.

When we returned we all decided to pack our bags and hang out with a lot of the group that night before waking up early the next morning and leaving for Rome.