Europe: Rome part two
Monday-Rome
Another day in Rome. Italy so far has been mega disappointing. It’s been awesome for seeing those famous sites, but the Italy I imagined was beautiful, relatively clean, groves around and well kept places. So far it hasn’t been any of that and Luke and I both agree that we’re disappointed. A lot.
Rome has a distinct ‘Cairo’ feel about, which, if you’ve read my Middle East blog posts you’ll know what we mean!
Anyway, today we went to the Vatican City. The smallest country in the world.
Another mega crazy metro trip with 50+ people and we finally got there. The line to get in went round two and a bit sides of the ‘country’. It sounds long, and was, but the country is obviously not huge.
We got to skip the long line cause we were in a pre-booked group and join a shorter line. Only a few hours after we had left the hotel and we were finally inside.
Catholicism makes me a bit queezy, so I was glad we didn’t spend heaps of time inside. Just enough to see the main sites. No Pope sighting today. 
We went into the Sistine Chappell, the one Michelangelo painted the ceiling of. What an amazing piece if art, even if it is a bit biblically inaccurate.
Luke and I love pizza and have been perfecting the pizza bases at home for quite a while now. So when Kim promised us the best pizza in Italy after the Vatican City I was a little dubious. The pizza I’d had in Europe so far has been pre-packaged bases. Thankfully though, she was right! We had a great selection of yummy, yummy pizza with fantastic bases (the secret to good pizza).
What I found to be interesting about the pizzas was that they only had like one-two toppings on them (plus cheese and sometimes sauce). We had margarita, eggplant slices (quite salty), potato (with parsley-so good), an onion calzone, and zucchini & anchovies.
You buy ‘slices’ so you can get quite a few flavours.
We wanted to get a feel for the city and read on the Lonely Planet guide of a street that was meant to be a bit hippy and very awesome. I’ve been looking for op-shops here cause I think you could find some fun things, buy Kim said Europe doesn’t really have any. This guide promised some though so we set off to find the area.
We didn’t really find what we were looking for which was disappointing. We had to rush like crazy to get back to the station in time (lots of walking remember, and not very frequent stations).
The night while everyone else went out for dinner and ‘all you can drink’ for €20 we went to a little place in a side alley.
Originally we’d booked somewhere formal that the lonely planet had recommended as cheap and nice. When we looked it up on the ‘Rome’ app Luke has it said the prices for a meal were up to €98! We quickly changed our reservation!!
The place we ended up going to was pretty good, but poor service. We never got our bruschetta and we got randomly given a fried artichoke (which we had to pay for). The artichoke was yummy, but the situation was strange.
€30 for a cab ride home is expensive when you start to covert to AUD but we’re not doing that anymore- it’s too depressing. We have all our Euros for the trip on the travel card so we just budget based on that.
-T
Michaelangelo,
Secrets, religion, and art.
Vatican City
-L
Tips for Travelers:
In Italy there is no free wifi without registering. This is due to post 9/11 laws…
Internet as a whole is expensive here (specifically Rome, but all of Italy included).
Thanks for visiting my site again! keep checking back for more updates!
