Our First Taste of Roma

Off to the train station for the next leg of the journey to Rome.  I had to drag Shan and the girls by the market just outside of our hotel as we headed to the train station.  We didn’t have much time as I pre-purchased the tickets but I’m sure it killed them to just keep walking...

Yep, another train station

 We had to change trains in LaSpezia and had about an hour layover.  I had to go validate the tickets and stumbled on a McDonalds!  Alyssa has been dying to get a McFlurry so I got in line but they weren’t open so we had to give it a miss this time around.  Once the train arrived everyone piled on and we soon discovered it was all assigned seating.  We thought we were smart by getting the last car as those ones are never full but instead we found out we were on car one and had to get to car six.  Well, everyone was messed up and people were booting others out of their seats so we just sat back and watched the chaos!  Shannon had to sit in the bathroom for a bit as there was nowhere else to stand until things cleared and then we went for it.  Eventually found our seats but as we walked into our berth the two girls sitting there didn’t move at all and were sprawled all over the cabin.  I finally had to tell them to get out of our seats and they begrudgedly moved.   They got off at the next stop so we had some sprawl time of our own until two girls from Germany got on so things were a bit cramped with six big backpacks in a six person berth.

As we headed down the coast things seemed to get a bit drier and we passed some huge marble quarries.  It was crazy how mountain sides have been cut away and we passed a number of areas where they load the huge cubes of granite on the train.  Pretty incredible how you can look out and see three or four mountains being cut down with huge vertical faces that they work.  Guess they had to get the granite for all the cathedrals and palaces that we’ve been touring for the last few weeks from somewhere.

Pretty cool light as we walked around Rome.

On this train trip Alyssa discovered something about the train system that none of us could believe.  The bathrooms just open and dump right on the tracks.  I was wondering why I was seeing so much toilet paper on and around the tracks at stations.  You guessed it, when you flush it just gets dumped where ever you are.  

Pretty incredible stone cravings on buildings.

We arrived in Rome and headed toward our hotel and well.... let’s just say we really weren’t impressed.  There were a pile of homeless people everywhere, drunks, it was dirty and smelly, tonnes of graffiti and not really looking all that safe.  Thank god it was the middle of the day as at night it would have been scary.  We got to use our code word “fluffy unicorns” for the first time as there was this dodgy looking guy following us so we put our backs to the wall and watched him walk by!  As we struggled to find our place apparently Jenna and I almost stepped on a dead rat on the sidewalk.  We sure didn’t see it as we were busy looking at addresses.  The place we had booked had no sign outside so when we found the location we were a little dumbstruck as there was just an apartment buzz in sign.   Hit the buzzer and were let in only to discover that they had a plumbing issue and they didn’t have a room for us after all!  Well I thought “this could be interesting” but I checked my email right away and found I had mail from our booking agency.  We’ve been using Booking.com for everything and they had already found us another place and said they would pay the difference in cost!  We decided to catch a cab as we were all done walking and it quite a ways from where we were.  Turns out this place is in a way better part of town and everything worked out nicely in the end. 

Crazy hotel and huge round about near the Termini Rail station, Rome.

 We checked in, got organized and had some downtime before we headed out for dinner.   Had a nice dinner and decided to go for a walk about to see some of Rome.  We definitely had a different feeling about it from our first impression as we came back to our hotel.  This place definitely has some poverty, homeless issues and there is the smell of urine around a fair bit but you can tell the city is trying to deal with it.  There are a number of army vehicles stationed around our area and not nearly the homeless stumbling around the street as there was in the other place.  The impressive part is when you walk down the street among all this beautiful older architecture; you stumble on a 2000 year old ruin right in the middle of the town.  They sure like their marble around here.  Tomorrow we head to the Coliseum which we’re all pretty excited about.

Cool light and crazy clouds welcomed us to Rome.