Rome I

1/30/15

Day 14

In my class that was rescheduled for this morning, we took a field trip to a grocery store. Yes. You heard that right. It sounds dumb but it ended up being really useful because now we can go there and buy things (like $1 wine and solid deodorant!) that are hard to find and more expensive in the center city Conads. There were even clothing shops- in the grocery store! This seemed much more similar to your typical American shopping experience and it was nice to have a lot of options again. 

My friend and I left early so we could get make our busses/planes/trains. It was really inefficient. My apartment/school are at one end of town and the train station is at the exact opposite end. We left school to catch the tram at the train station. Then, we had to go back home to finish packing and grab our bags. Then, we had to go back to the train station to leave. I had the second half of my Hawaiian pizza from last night (still not sure if it's rude to ask to box food and take it home??) for breakfast/lunch, and ran out the door. I successfully bought and validated my ticket to Roma Termini and thankfully, the second train adventure was much less confusing than the first. I might actually have figured it out! But I don't completely trust myself yet... 

Our train ride was almost 4 hours long but somehow it was still fun. I think it snowed for the first time in 4 years.

The only stressful part was going through a bunch of tunnels and our ears would pop. Once, we passed another train in the tunnel and the windows shook and there was a loud, high pitched noise, and we all reacted to the pain in our eardrums. And it was weird that if you go to the bathroom, it goes straight into the tracks... Obviously I had to attempt this, just for the bucket list!

But finally, we arrived! We found our hostel and walked in, starving but excited to be there. The first words out of the manager's mouth were, "Passports, please" and all of us looked at each other in a panic. Nowhere had anything mentioned passports. My friend who booked the hostel had called ahead and asked and was told that no, we would not need our passports to stay there. WRONG. I have no idea why we're not either back in Florence or sleeping on the floor of one of our friends of a friend, but somehow I'm writing this from a very warm, very cozy bed in Rome. The towel warmer even works! (Unlike my apartment in Florence) This cool map is hanging in a common area- I'm just a little confused as to why Pittsburgh got a shoutout but Florence got snubbed... When I say I go to school in Pittsburgh people look confused but when I say I'm studying abroad in Florence, I'm pretty sure the whole world knows what I'm saying. 

In our search for food, we couldn't resist sight seeing a little. I'm not 100% on what some of this stuff actually is but it's really frickin cool! 

Church that feels like I stepped onto the set of the Da Vinci Code

Foro di Nerva: surprisingly this wasn't the coolest part, but it did photograph the best. The rest of it looked like it belonged to a video game- it was that cool. 

This needs no caption.