We got up at 3:50 am this morning to catch our flight from Budapest to Rome. Didn’t have any problems this time at the airport. However, when we arrived, we decided to take the bus which confused us a bit. The bus was full when we left the airport, but somehow we managed to keep picking up more passengers along the way. We also missed our stop. We planned to get off at the train station in Ciampino, but we missed the stop. We noticed it as we drove away from it so we ended up getting off at the subsequent stop. The bus driver told us we could just catch the metro to Rome. But we didn’t really understand what he meant at the time. We probably spent about a half hour there trying to figure it out, with little help from the train people since they didn’t speak much English. Andy actually figured it out. When we got off at Termini, we walked to the hostel but no one was there. We ended up asking the neighboring hostel (Savannah House) and they actually helped us out by calling the hostel. It’s actually just a group of independently owned guest houses. It’s decent, though we should expect some amount of independence since our host doesn’t speak a lot of English either. The first thing we ended up doing was walking down tot he Coliseum. After talking to a tour guide, we took their restaurant recommendation and decided to go back later for a tour. We had fried vegetable pizza and lasagna with meat at Pizzeria Lizzi. It was quite entertaining. The waitstaff accidentally sat two couples at a table awkwardly and spent the entire time confused and talking about it. Andy’s pizza came out first and it looked like vegetables just meant watercress. Then they brought out a pizza and lasagna to the table next to us even though we were seated and ordered before them. We eventually got my lasagna though. They also brought food to the wrong table and I ended up switching their food. Anyways, we went on a tour of the Coliseum afterwards. The tour guide could have been better. He kept talking about the same things repeatedly and was not very energetic. The next guide for the Roman Forum was David Battaglino. +39 345 3370484, email david-tours@live.com. He was great. He gave us some interesting history and tips. He talked about how it functions as their marketplace. Some of the tips he gave us included how water was free and safe from the fountains, bathrooms must be made available to public by law, where to go to eat, ect. He mentioned another tour he was giving later in the evening and we decided to do that as well. We grabbed a beer from the store and walked around drinking it in public. That’s allowed anywhere until 10 pm apparently. He took us to Colonna Traiana, past Monumento a Vittorio Emanuele 11, past Ara Coeli and Campidoglio, past the Teatro Marcello (looks like the miniature version of the Coliseum, to a church with a walk through the underground, past the Synagogue, by the elephant obelisk (with the trunk giving the middle finger and the trunk moving as to motion he would be pooping), by the Pantheon, and ending at the Piazza di Navona (one side curved because it was built on ruins and supporting the hill while one side was flat). We then walked over to Ciambella for pasta. We had a lamb with potatoes and risotto with buffalo milk (first course meal). It was small portions but it seemed okay. The food itself was good. We headed home after that. Oh, we also stopped at the cat sanctuary. That was fun.
Going on and on