Rome!!

Happy 4th of July!  Hopefully everyone is enjoying the holiday!  I made it back to the ship successfully after 3 nights in Roma!  I had a little bit of a rough start on Wednesday, but then had an absolute blast.  Docking in Ciavitavecchia took a little bit longer than in Spain, so everyone was very ready to get off the ship when they finally cleared us.  I walked with a big herd or people from SAS to the train station and got my ticket to Termini station in Rome.  The train was really packed and I had to stand for the whole train ride – it was also extremely hot and stuffy with all the people crammed in.  When I got to Rome I got pretty lost in the train station because I was trying to meet up with the rest of my family who was already there waiting for me.  I finally found them and we checked our baggage at the train station and headed out for a day of sightseeing.

First we went to the Vatican Museum and Sistine Chapel.  The museum wasn’t that interesting, but once we got to the Sistine Chapel, I had the Rick Steves’ audio tour on my iPod so he explained everything about the artwork which made it especially fascinating.  After that we headed to St. Peter’s Basilica which was REALLY impressive.  It was gigantic and had so many sculptures and artwork, including Michelangelo’s Pieta.  I listened to another Rick Steves’ audio tour which was great so that I knew what I was looking at.  We were all starving by this point so we stopped for lunch at a restaurant called Borgi Nuovo.  Then we went back to Termini station to pick up our luggage and headed to the hotel named Hotel Golden.  It was a cute little family-run hotel with only 15 rooms.  Mom and Dad had their own room while I shared a room with Mary Kate, Brian, and Brian’s friend Jill.  We were pretty exhausted from a long day of walking so we all took a nap and then went to dinner at San Marco.  I had a 4-cheese pizza, but was so full from lunch that I could only eat half of it.  Luckily we had a fridge in our hotel room so we were able to bring it home to eat later.  After dinner we got some gelato (I had a chocolate with hazelnuts) and then just hung out and drank wine before going to sleep.  Lucky for me, my family had bought 8 bottles of wine when they went wine tasting in Tuscany and I got to help drink them!

The next morning started off early again.  The hotel had a nice little breakfast with lots of breads, spreads, pastries, and some meats.  Then we headed for our day touring ancient Rome.  We had audio tours from Rick Steves for all the places we went that day: Colosseum, Forum, and Pantheon.  These places were all really cool to see because they are so much older than anything we have in the US and it is amazing to think about how they built all of that stuff without the technology that we have today.  The Pantheon was my favorite place though because I realized that it must be what the Rotunda at UVa is based off of.  I’m sure if I ever went on a historical tour I would learn that, but it was a really pretty building and reminded me of UVa but in Rome!  Then we found a restaurant for lunch and headed back to the hotel.  The walk to the hotel was really long so we stopped by Trevi fountain and had some delicious gelato (I had half Nutella and half caramel crème).  We all took another nap in the hotel after an exhausting day while Mom and Dad were nice enough to go to the laundromat and wash all of our dirty clothes.  After we were all rested, we headed for dinner at Il Pomodorino.  After that we retired to the hotel for some more wine and then bedtime.

We woke up early again on Friday morning to get to our 9:00am appointment at the Borghese museum of Renaissance art.  The first floor was entirely sculpture and the second floor had paintings.  It would have been nice to have an audio tour to talk about the artwork but it was still nice to look at.  Then we met up with Brian and Jill and decided to go to the Rome Zoo because it was close to the museum.  None of us had been to a zoo recently so it was fun to look at all the adorable animals, and a lot of the zoo was in the shade so it helped with the heat too.  Then we walked to the Spanish steps and relaxed there – I can see how it would be easy to sit on those steps and people watch for hours.  Then we went to a nearby restaurant for lunch and back to the hotel for our daily nap.  The nap was great and then we walked to Campo di Fiori to have dinner.  After dinner Mom and Dad split off to have a nice walk around Rome at night while Brian, Jill, Mary Kate, and I headed to a pub crawl.  Apparently there are lots of different crawls that go on for the tourists and stuff.  We did the Forum pub crawl and went to 3 different bars and got the t-shirt.  We successfully requested Michael Jackson at all the bars so we could dance!  We went back to the hotel afterwards for my last night of sleep in Rome.

This morning we all woke up and had to go our separate ways.  Jill left for the airport to fly back to Chicago and I went to the train station with my family but they were headed to Venice while I was headed to Naples to meet back up with the ship.  My train ride back was just over an hour and Mom had splurged for a first class ticket so I had a very nice ride.  I took a cab from the Naples train station to my ship, and it was definitely nice to come back on and get unpacked and settled again.  I had such an amazing time in Rome, and am so glad that I got to hang out with my family for a few days!  Tomorrow I have a trip with SAS to Pompeii so that should be really fun, and then I will be back on the ship for another day at sea!