On the way to Rome we had a few hours in Paris, so we had a little picnic by the Eiffel Tower and I finally got to see the tower during the day. Then we spent the night in a parking lot waiting for our bus to the Paris Beauvais airport. We hadn't made hostel reservations because we thought we'd be able to take the bus early and then sleep in the airport, but we couldn't get a bus until 6am, so we were definitely regretting that decision, but every single hostel/hotel was booked. The night was miserable. It was SO cold - we put on pretty much all the clothes we had, and were still freezing. Needless to say, we didn't get much sleep. That would be a trend this week, since we spent another night in a train station and another in a different airport.
I had about 4 full days in Rome, and did pretty much everything I was wanting to do there. When I first arrived I did encounter some problems though. First, it took a while to find our hostel, and when we finally found it, we were told we didn't have reservations. For some reason the reservation didn't go through on hostelworld, and I found out I did in fact not have any booking confirmation in my email. This was the guy's advice for us: "To have no hostel reservation in Rome is suicide." He did let us use his wifi and we found one hostel that had room left, Hostel Peter Pan. So we hastily made the reservation and set out to find it.
The hostel was definitely one of the worse hostels I've stayed at in Europe - probably why it had room available. The main issue was that the people were incredibly loud at all hours of the day. Also, the bathroom shower got water all over the place, so you were always walking through water. But we had a place to sleep, which was good enough.
One really cool thing about Rome is the plethora of free drinking water throughout the city. Any fountain with a spout has clean water, so if you carry a water bottle around with you, you'll have zero problem finding a place to refill it. Throughout the semester one thing we really noticed was the lack of water fountains in Europe, so Rome was definitely a nice change.
The first day we got to Rome, after we got to our hostel, we pretty much crashed right away (seriously it was like 5pm). The next day (Saturday I think) we walked around a bit and then went to the Vatican. We toured the museums, which not only had incredible pieces of artwork but were basically art themselves, since most of the walls were painted directly on and had insane ceilings.
We also saw the Sistine Chapel, which was incredible -
So the Vatican was pretty neat. You can't go in unless your shoulders and knees are covered, so I had to go buy leggings to wear under my shorts and looked pretty silly the entire day. And you have to go through security to get in. I did use the Vatican postal system to mail home a postcard, since its supposed to be one of the best in the world.
Sunday we planned to go see St. Peter's, and we weren't sure if we'd be able to get in since it was Sunday, but we went really early and got in no problem. Normally there is a HUGE line, but apparently 7am is fine. Going on a Sunday was actually really neat - we got to see part of a service going on inside (in English!).
We came back around noon to meet up with friends and it was PACKED with mass going on.
Here's everything else we saw that weekend -
- Piazza del Popolo, where we took a picture with Mickey Mouse
- Spanish Steps (packed)
-St. Peter's Square, which was actually really interesting. There are two places in the square where you can stand and 4 rows of columns in front of you line up and look like 1.
-Vittorio Emanuele II Monument
Oh and right by the momument there was some big event going on, with kids playing volleyball, a bike obstacle course, people skateboarding, and a band. And there were some green/anti-nuclear protesters or something. So we walked around there for a while and even got our first glimpse of the Colosseum.
-The Pantheon
-The Colosseum
-Palatine Hill
-Roman Forum
-Trevi Fountain
-lots of bridges and obelisks and ruins and fountains
And we went to Pompeii on one of the last days. It poured, so we didn't get to spend a whole lot of time there, but it was really neat. So that was Rome! Then we spent the night in the airport in Rome, flew back to Paris, where I trained back to Metz, got my luggage, trained to Zurich, and spent the next night in (and outside of for a few hours when we were kicked out) the Zurich train station waiting for the train to go to the airport to fly home to Atlanta. I'll end this post with a picture of me being homeless in Switzerland:
Oh and did I mention that Rome has the BEST pizza ever? I think I ate it about 5 or 6 times while I was there. Incredible. :)
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