Täglich Wiederkehrendes Abenteuer

The train ride to Rome went fairly well. I actually managed to sleep a lot more than I was expecting! There was one little problem though. I had planned on arriving at the main train station in Rome, but on closer inspection, our tickets brought us to a different station in Rome. I really have no idea why I didn’t notice that earlier, but if that’s the worst thing that happens after trying to plan a month of traveling, you’ll get no complaints from me!

We actually managed to get a metro ticket and ride the subway over to the main station without incident. Once we were there, we needed to pick up our Roma Passes for all the tourist stuff. The place actually opened later than they were suppose to, so we ended up needing to buy another subway ticket to make it to the hostel. Considering that the dude was a little rude to someone else that asked why they weren’t ready to open when they were suppose to, we should have gone back and demanded the 2 Euro they cost us in subway tickets!

Joni is actually all curious about if rudeness is a cultural thing. Maybe it’s not uncommon in Italian culture to “open” at 9, but not be ready to go until 9:10. All we know is that we missed the expiration time of our tickets by about a minute, so that culture thing translates into money lost if you don’t know about it.

Anyway, that wasn’t really a big deal. We caught the subway and made it to the hostel no problem. We got all checked in and the nice man that runs the place showed us the main sights on a map. The room is actually really nice. We’re planning on getting some pictures/video to show it off. We got unpacked a little, then decided to just lay down for a bit, since we were both a little tired.

Yeah, we woke up four and a half hours later. I guess we were more worn out than we thought. Still, it was nice to just get a good rest in. We woke up about 3 or so and decided to see a little bit of the city, even if we were just a haaaaaiiiiir sleepy still. We got our stuff and wandered out. We’re in a great location, so we decided to just take a short trip to the Piazza del Popolla, of People’s Square. I guess this used to be the site of executions in old Rome.

The walk down there brought us past a bunch of shops and another Billa. We also got to see the insanity that is Rome traffic almost first hand. You wouldn’t catch me driving dead in this city… mainly because I’m dead, but also because it would suck. These people are nuts!

Once we got to the plaza, we were immediately harassed by guys trying to “give” us a flower. They’d run up to you and say “I give you present! I’m very good guy! Here, present!” We refused, mainly because there’s always a catch to this sort of thing, but Joni is also of the opinion that dragging around a real flower that’s going to die is just a pain. We’re still not sure how the “free” flower translates into the guy getting money, but we did see people take the “free” “gift” and then get harasses further for money. Those guys were persistent and plentiful.

We sat in the square for a bit, then saw the churches surrounding it. Churches in Rome are more “normal” European churches than in Venice. We saw that GreenPeace was doing some demonstration on a big hill that overlooks the square, so Joni led us up there.

Also, the bread commanded it, and we listen to the bread.

It turned out that there was a big park up there and a pretty darn decent view of the city.

We walked around the park a bit, saw stupid pigeons, got harassed by another flower guy, saw some crazy good roller bladers doing trick skating, and briefly looked over a tiny arcade in the park. We saw a bunch of people with four seater bikes too, so we might try to find them at some point.

At one point I was going to do a picture of us, and Joni asked what her motivation was. I told her “Abject terror.” This was the result:

Teehee, see what I did there? Oh, we also saw a fountain with a baby being either launched into, or retrieved from, a river.

We eventually decided to head back to the hostel. The trip back was pretty interesting. On the way we stopped at Billa and got some bread and butter and a little Italian salad thing. We also stopped to get Joni a long sleeved shawl thing. More interesting than either of those though, we also saw a scooter that thought it was a person!

Once back at the hostel, we munched on our gigantic meal and were soon satisfied. We even snagged some free tuna from the community fridge. Not sure who stocks a community fridge with tuna, but no complaints here.

Billa also provided us with what Joni calls “The best cherries ever!” Yeah, we got some Italian cherries too, and I guess they’re the best cherries Joni has ever had. She’s already plotting on getting more before we leave.

After supper I started doing some dry blogging while Joni went to clean the silverware. She never came back, so I went to check on her. I found that she was chatting with some other people in the kitchen. We learned that the two girls she had met were from the states. We spent the rest of the evening chatting with Erin and Kelsey (no idea if that’s the right spelling) before heading off to bed. I went to sleep almost immediately while Joni did a little outline of the day.