Roma

We decided to take advantage of our first four day weekend over here and do some traveling. The toughest decision we had to make was where to go! The possibilities seem endless. We tossed around the idea of Italy and finally settled on Rome. So on Friday we headed to London Stansted to catch a flight to Ciampino, one of Rome's two airports.

We let our landlords know that we would be out of the country for the next 4 days and they strongly encouraged us to set the alarm system for the house that we hadn't bothered with since moving in. Aaron fiddled with it the night before we left and finally was able to change the pass code from the obvious 1-2-3-4 (which would be the the first thing a burglar would try, right?!) It's important to note that we tested the system out and got to hear how annoying the alarm system was once set off, inside and outside.

We chose to fly Ryanair for obvious reasons, they are usually the cheapest way to fly most places in Europe. For example, right now they are having a sale boasting ticket prices of £16.99 one way. That's like $27 a ticket! Pretty awesome if you ask me! So anyways, the flight was basic, cramped and slightly uncomfortable but it was a 2 hour flight, no room to complain. The no-frills flight didn't stop the mostly male flight attendants from selling anything from snacks and drinks to a whole catelogue full of toys, perfumes etc. They even roamed the aisles selling lottery tickets.

We arrived in Rome just as it was getting dark, so the bus ride from the airport to the main terminal station proved hard to see any major sights. Our hotel was approx a 12 min walk from the station but we were faced with our first obstacle as soon as we disembarked the bus. The directions I had printed from the hotel had street names but we couldn't find them anywhere. We went into the metro station in search of a map but only found the routes of the buses and metro. We decided to activate our cell phone to use the GPS - which cost extra money due to being out of the country in order to get headed in the right direction. We eventually discovered that the street names were engraved about halfway up the buildings on each corner. Before long, we arrived at Hotel Napoleon, our home away from home while in Rome. The reviews for this hotel were excellent minus the occasional mentioning of it being in a shady area of Rome. We quickly realized this to be true. The square surrounding the hotel was full of flea market type of goods. Anything from shoes to sweaters to men trying to sell random toys spread out on a sheet on the ground. We checked in and got settled. We had reservations at the hotel restaurant for dinner that night and when we checked in we received a special invitation to attend an hour of wine tasting and appetizers with the hotel owner. As a P.S. - feel stupid moment #1 would be having the bellhop (first sign we were outside of our normal Holiday Inn comfort zone) take our bags to the room and adjust the temperature and fix our drapes and realized that we only had €20 euro bills to tip him with. We felt horribly unprepared for such moments.

Second sign we weren't at the Holiday Inn, look at the elevator!

We enjoyed meeting the hotel owner and trying some cheese, salami and I almost tried what looked like bruschetta and had it halfway in my mouth when the stench of something fish-like entered my senses and I just couldn't do it. Our first meal in Italy included spaghetti carbonara for me and lasagna for Aaron.

Spaghetti carbonara - spaghetti with bacon and egg

After dinner, I insisted we go out in search of gelati. It didn't seem like there were many decent places nearby but good old Google helped us out and found a gelati place ranked 4.4 stars named Palazzo del Freddo. 

It definitely lived up to it's star rating. Aaron tried a cherry, berry and what we think to be cantelope flavored. I tried chocolate, hazelnut and chocolate chip. I'm sure the workers get a kick out of us English speakers attempting to pronounce their flavors in Italian.
We quickly realized that English and communicating weren't much of a problem. Most people knew English pretty well. That didn't stop Aaron from yelling grazi every moment he could.
On Saturday, we had a tour of Vatican City scheduled for 11AM. The tour was projected to be 3 hours. We gave ourselves plenty of time to catch the metro to the area we needed to be in. Feel stupid moment #2: we stopped at the concierge's desk in the lobby to ask about metro tickets and how to go about getting them. The concierge pulled out 2 tickets and told us we could have them. We were so grateful! Then he said, no, you pay now. Woops! The metro ride was uneventful. The Italian metro does not have individually seperated cars, it is one big, long train. Which made it weird to look down the train while going around a corner. Also, at one point, the train slowed to pass another train coming the opposite way and we heard a desperate voice calling out in Italian growing nearer to where we were standing. We thought it might be praying but no, it was just a woman begging. On another metro ride we saw a little boy about 6 or 7 years old weaving in and out of the passengers begging for money.
Our tour of Vatican City was amazing. I feel like if we wouldn't have booked a tour, we probably would have spent the entire day there. The tour took us through one side of the Vatican museums, outdoors to a courtyard, to the Sistine Chapel where we were able take time to marvel at Michangelo's works on the ceiling and front of the chapel.

The tour also included a visit to St. Peter's Basilica, the largest Catholic church in the world. Our tour guide was awesome, although she created a bit of an information overload with 3 hours worth of material to digest.

Inside the basilica

St. Peter's dome

The Pope's altar

When the tour ended, we decided to breeze through the crypts, which happened to be open and super creepy by the way. By that time, we were both desperately wanting to sit down. So we decided to walk and see where it took us. Our tour guide recommended leaving the more touristy area right outside of the Vatican. So we began walking, with one my tour book maps to guide our way.

                                                        

We passed by Castel Sant'Angelo and stopped shortly after to eat lunch at a pizzeria. We were hoping to find some authentic pizza and we ordered what we though would be ham and cheese pizza. When our food arrived, it was ham and cheese inside of a folded, flat, crisp crust. It wasn't pizza but it was delicious. 

We took a look at the map and decided to start walking towards the Pantheon and see what other sights we could see in the process. 

Piazza Narvona

The Pantheon was amazing. It was free to go in and roam around so we enjoyed its astounding architecture. 

We also found the Trevi Fountain, which was something I wanted to make sure we saw. 

We were starting to feel tired of walking but the weather was beautiful! We decided to push through and walk to the Colosseum. The weather forecast for the next day was to be rainy so we figured we go get some pictures of the Colosseum while the sun was setting. As we approached the massive structure we noticed all of the scaffolding in place. We found out the next day that the Colosseum is currently under a cleaning phase. We were able to see parts of it without the scaffolding but were bummed to see that the outer layer you famously see in pictures, was hidden. 

After this walk to the Colosseum, I was ready to crash. I knew that once we got back to the hotel, I wouldn't be leaving anytime soon. So we ate some more gelati to justify all of the walking and settled into our hotel for the night like the old souls that we are. : ) 

The next day, we were back to the Colosseum for another guided tour. This time around, our tour guide was an archaeologist who was extremely knowledgeable and informative. We met another couple who were actually on our tour of the Vatican as well. They were from England as well, not too far from where we live. They wanted to know why in the world we left America to come to the UK. Um, hello .. Europe, need we say more? 

The Colosseum was massive and breathtaking. It is just amazing to think of a structure built almost two thousand years ago still around today. 

Our tour also took us to ancient Rome and provided us the opportunity to imagine things before the Roman empire collapsed. 

After our tour, we went off in search of some real pizza this time. Aaron ordered the spicy salami pizza and it arrived with what looked like pepper flake jelly in small clusters throughout the pie. It smelled good, but had a weird consistency. I played it safe and ordered ravioli. 

We decided to walk to where they held the chariot races which wasn't too far from the Colosseum. There wasn't much to see. We sat down and looked at the map and were pondering our next move when it started downpouring. It had been sprinkling on and off again throughout the morning but this was absurd! All of a sudden, all of the men who had been trying to sell us souvenirs had magically appeared with ponchos and umbrellas to sell. We hurried to the nearest metro station and bought tickets. When I approached the ticket machine, my ticket was fed into the machine and didn't come out - so the barrier never opened for me to get through. Aaron had already made it through and he tried communicating with the metro worker that was standing at the gate. The guard just smirked and shrugged his shoulders. Finally, someone came up and put their ticket into the machine that ate mine and two tickets popped out. We got off in the Trevi Fountain area and did some souvenir shopping. When we went to take the metro back to the hotel, my ticket worked and Aaron's didn't. We found out that tickets we originally purchased were for one trip and that my ticket hadn't be processed because of it getting stuck in the machine. So I handed Aaron the money over the barrier and waited for him there. The ticket machine wouldn't give him change so he had to go upstairs to the newstand to buy a single ticket. The newstand was closed so he came back down and had to buy 3 tickets minimum to break the bill he had. There was a homeless man begging Aaron for money. Even though he only spoke Italian, Aaron was able to understand that he had one euro and need 50 pence more to have enough for a ticket. At that point, Aaron was flustered and frustrated from figuring out how many more tickets he had to buy so he hastily gave the homeless man some change and then had a second thought and grabbed the change out of the homeless mans hands and placed a metro ticket in his hand. If the man needed 50 pence to get a ticket, then Aaron did him one better and gave him an actual ticket. The thing is, we didn't see him come through to take the metro .. so who knows what happened from there, but Aaron didn't stick around to see what the shock on the homeless mans face would lead to after he gave him money and then took it back. 

Once back to the hotel, we asked the concierge where to eat near the hotel. By that time, we were exhausted from the day's tour and rainstorm. We got two recommendations being that it was a Sunday evening and not many places were open. The restaurant that we decided on was probably as close to an authentic Italian experience as we could get. Aaron ordered stromboli and I tried a different kind of spaghetti and we both had a garlic bread bruschetta type of appetizer. We noticed that it doesn't seem like they serve spaghetti with tomato sauce like we are accustomed to. The only pasta dish that we saw with tomato sauce was elbow macaroni. Maybe we were looking in the wrong places but we concluded that Italian food is actually quite different than American Italian food.  

The next morning, we were up early to catch the shuttle to the airport and head back home. We were satisfied with everything that we got to see and do and were looking forward to getting home before one, so that we would have the afternoon at home. Flying out of Ciampino was much more complicated than flying out Stansted proved to be. We had to form a line once in the terminal to get on multiple buses that shuttled us to the airplane. Ryanair does not assign seats, so you could have been the last one to board the bus shuttle and the first one to board the plane, it didn't matter. Once landing in Stansted, we headed for customs and to pass through border patrol. It's important to note here that when we got orders to England, I went through a rather long and complicated journey (thank you Denise) to get my visa stating I was accompanying Aaron on military orders. Once we arrived to England, I had even more difficulty getting my tricare health insurance activated because my name was not physically on Aaron's set of orders. It's safe to say that once my visa was in hand, I thought the worst was over - yet Aaron was convinced troubles would continue to haunt us. So my UK visa is in a government issued passport. We were given the advice to use our travel passports for leisure trips. So that was the only passport I brought along on the trip. Feel stupid moment #3. While we were in Italy, Aaron wondered out loud if I had brought my government issued passport and I said, no. Well, it turns out that I did indeed need it to re-enter the country. It's kind of a duh moment where you realize, yes .. I probably should have brought that along. So we approached the customs window praying that there wouldn't be any difficulties. Aaron had no difficulty in explaining that he was a member of the visiting forces, showed his ID and they stamped his passport. For me, they questioned where my visa was and wanted to know why I would ever travel without it. We explained that it was our first time traveling abroad from England and that I do indeed have a visa. I assumed that they would have this information in the system anyways. So we were told to take a seat so that they could check my name in the database. The woman who helped us stated that if I was indeed telling the truth, we had nothing to worry about. Which is how we felt, nothing to worry about. It took a little bit and she returned and we returned to the counter. She told us that they looked pretty extensively in the database and were not able to find my name anywhere. This is about the time where I started to panic and imagine detainment at its worst. My visa was in a locked safe over an hour away. Aaron told her that the NY consulate issued it, what did we have to do to prove this? She went on to hand me a paper informing me that I was being detained so that she could look up some further information. We sat back down and started discussing what to do. I would have to stay there for obvious reasons while Aaron went back to the house and got my visa. The lady returned and told us that they had found my name in another database. Why would there be multiple databases and why is it that I'm not in the main one?! No time to question such things, we were ready to move forward and never look back and never, ever travel again without multiple passports in hand. I feel like I've got the mark now and I'll be on the list on the clipboard that they go look at when questions are raised at the UK border. Oh well, lesson learned. 

We arrived home safe and sound a little later than we hoped but home nonetheless. We discovered the house alarm had been reset when the power went off at some point during our absence. So now, it has randomly been going off without it even being set at all. 

If we've gotten anything at all out of this trip, it's that we've felt the need to watch The DaVinci Code and Gladiator. Stay tuned for more travel stories!