Hey everyone! We started today off by catching a 10:40 train to Rome. It was a roughly an hour and half trip on one of Italy’s high speed trains. Their trains aren’t as nice as the ones in Spain. The Italian trains don’t have as large of overhead storage as the Spanish trains did, so we had to put our bags in front of us (which got annoying). We had about a 5 minute walk from the train station to our hostel “The Yellow”. I’ve heard good things about our hostel, and it seems to be pretty trendy. The beds aren’t as nice as previous places, and the wifi is only downstairs, but it seems like the largest hostile we’ve stayed at. They have 6 floors of rooms with about 30 different rooms.
We headed out into the city and took a bus toward a place where we could get tickets to tonight’s A.S. Roma game. We got off the bus, and found the store closed till 2:15pm so we stopped and got lunch at a local restaurant. We came back to the store and got our tickets. We bought the cheapest tickets for 15 Euro for the game at 8:45 tonight. Even though I’m not a Roma fan, I thought it would still be good to see a match. Next we walked 5 minutes over to the Pantheon and viewed it for probably 20-25 minutes. I had studied it back in high school in art history, so I thought it was cool to see it in person. The artwork on the inside was really impressive and I loved the sun coming in from the hole in the ceiling. Next, we headed over to the Trinity fountain which was a short 10 minute walk away. It is really crowded in Rome and there are people everywhere. It is definitely a tourist town, and most people local people speak English (enough to communicate without too much trouble). I’ve really liked what I’ve seen of Italy and Rome is only adding to that. The Trinity fountain was beautiful. We took pictures in front of the fountain trying to dodge random people in our pictures; we had to practically fight for an open spot in front of the fountain to take pictures.
So at this point in the day it was roughly 3:30-4pm so we decided to go ahead and knock out the Colosseum while we had time on our hands. We decided to go ahead and get a guided tour for 22 Euro because regular tickets were 12 Euro and with the tour, we got to skip the 30-45 minute wait for tickets and we got to hear a little history about the Colosseum. It was interesting to hear all the information our tour guide told us, the traditions of the Emperors, how the games began, and how they funded the games through the slave trade. It started raining pretty hard while we were there so it was fortunate that part of the Colosseum was covered. We got rained on trying to take pictures but it wasn’t all that bad. We also ran into the A&M group led by Sally Guyton and we got to see Grace Anne, Grace Harms, Trey, Amy, Rus and a few other people for a brief two minutes. We might try to meet up with them tomorrow night or something for a quick hangout, if we can work out the logistics (they’re hotel is 45 minutes from ours).
Tonight we took a 45-50 minute bus out to the Roma game. Our bus was packed with people shoulder to shoulder and really couldn’t hold any more people. We got off and grabbed dinner at one of the vendors outside the stadium. I had to slices of pizza which was my favorite since coming to Italy; it was really good. The game itself was ok, the soccer wasn’t great but we got to see two goals. The Roma fans (mostly youth and people in their 20’s) were really into it chanting and waving flags. I expected the chanting and everything, so it wasn’t really a surprise to me. The stadium was pretty dirty, all the seats were almost unusable without putting a newspaper down first as most locals knew to bring. We only stayed till half time though, and we stood the entire time we were there.
Tomorrow I think we are planning on seeing the Vatican around 11:30 and after that I’m not sure what the plan is. I think we are going to see the Spanish steps tomorrow night, so I’ll update again tomorrow. Night!
Jonathan
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