Hello!
[disclaimer: this post describes a couple of very negative situations, one of which I haven’t had the time to decided whether or not it’s too much information. I wrote it anyway, haha]
The city of the day today is Rome, Italy! This place is sooo beautiful, but let me rewind to Venice. We left Venice last night and took a night train to Rome. That was by far the worst train ride and worst night of sleep I’ve ever had in my life. For one, the seats were impractical and uncomfortable. It was impossible to fall asleep because of not only this fact, but the fact that the train was overbooked. We reserved our seats the previous day and opted to go for seats instead of beds because seats were only 3 euros and beds were 30. Since we had seats reserved, we had a ticket listing our seat numbers but apparently we were the only ones. When we first got to our car of 6 seats, there was just a man there. Eventually a lady with a kid comes in and another lady comes to join them. The man leaves for some reason and a pregnant girl takes his spot. The girl’s friend and boyfriend are sitting outside of our car talking and the friend is one of those people that obnoxiously leaves the sound on her phone so that every time she types in her phone it makes the annoying clicking sound. These people were loud, but I was able to fall asleep. From there it was a blur. Who knows how long I was asleep before I wake up and an old lady has taken the girl’s place and is talking loudly in Italian with someone out in the hall. At this point, our car was freezing cold, it was loud, and the woman next to me was a quarter of the way into my seat trying to make room for her sleeping son. I eventually fell asleep again and woke up to an old man across from me shaking his legs back and forth and hitting mine every few seconds. I put my legs up on the seat cross-cross applesauce and tried to fall back asleep and I did, soon after waking up with terrible leg and foot cramps. Later in the night/morning, I wake up when the lady next to me shifts (by the way, we were all shifting throughout the night trying to get comfortable, which woke seat partners up). The seat across from me is finally open so she can lay her son down over there and stay seated next to me! Win! About 2 minutes later, a man comes to the car and starts yelling at Rusti Ann in Italian, who is asleep! He thought the kid was Rusti Anne’s and wanted her to move him, but she just kept saying “that’s not my kid!”. The lady next to me whispers, “Dios mio”, and goes to share the uncomfortable seat with the kid again, leaving the seat next to me open for the kind gentleman to sit in. He reeked of alcohol, so I scooted away and didn’t make eye contact. It’s about 5am at this point and I’ve gotten maybe 2 hours of sleep. I was freezing, exhausted, sore, and was truly ready to jump out of the moving train because surely the Italian countryside is a better place to catch a few winks than a loud, stinky, freezing, overcrowded, old train. I don’t remember what it was that finally set me off, but at one point I just looked at Rusti Anne and said, “What the HECK is going on!”. I was ready to hurt someone by the time I got off that train and knew that even though it was 6:30am, we wouldn’t be able to check into our apartment that we rented here in Rome until after noon. Despite a long wait and confusion from the employee who spoke little English, we were able to find a nice restaurant to have lunch and eventually got into our apartment. For the price, this place is pretty good. The worst part about the place is that there’s no wifi, but it is right across the street from the train station, so that is a plus. We napped for around 3 hours and then after getting cleaned up, went to go see the sites we’d planned to see while waiting in the morning. Before I left, Jasmine gave me a map of the city and marked a bunch of places we had to go and we actually got quite a dew of them today! We started at Piazza del Popolo, then went to the Trevi Fountain which was absolutely incredible to see in person, Piazza Novono, and the Pantheon! We also stopped at a bunch of other places. Even though this day was awesome, it was also pretty painful because I drank a bunch of fountain water in Venice yesterday and today my stomach was not happy about it. Despite the pain and feeling of needing to run to the bathroom every 5 minutes, I still joined the others in having gelato at the Trevi fountain and it was delicious! After sight seeing, we squatted at a little restaurant we found walking around and enjoyed a good meal and some wine. Then, I really wanted to check out the Trevi fountain at night, so we went to piazza Novono and Trevi for a second time. They were both so beautiful at night with their lights shining on them and the Roman night time alive around them. This place is so lively and has so much energy, even at night! We were all pretty tired, so we were back to the apartment around 11. I am very tired but I have no clue when I’ll have time to write again so let me talk about Venice for a little. I’ll use bullet points because they’re faster.
– after hanging out by the pool with the German girls, I showered, did some planning, then caught a shuttle back to the city
– got there, studied the few Italian phrases that Jasmine wrote down for me, put the notebook away, and pretended to be a local
-ordered my first gelato in Italian, but I forgot the word “gelato” while doing it lol!
-found a bathroom to use for free in a restaurant, but bought a juice there out of courtesy. Asked the restaurant guy in Italian where a bathroom was and he responded in rapid Italian, qualifying me as a convincing actress. He thought I spoke Italian!
-walked around, found a pizza shop that I found online, went back to the campsite
– the next day, we walked around Venice with the German girls and saw more sights. I had 3 gelatos that day! Also, the girls are coming here to Rome tomorrow, so we’re going to hang out with them tomorrow night!
– waited for night train, had horrible night train experience.
And we come full circle! Well it is 12:30 and well past my bedtime so goodnight! No wifi here, so I will post this tomorrow morning at a cafe. Buenos noches!