Rome - Tuesday

Hello everyone,

Its 7pm and we've finished a great day of touring "broken stuff". Our highly technical Rome schedule includes days for "broken stuff", "dead people", "religious stuff", "vatican stuff (a day in itself)", etc.

The trip over went great, Alex was pretty jazzed about the inseat video system, allowing movie watching, tracking the plane on maps (it apparently got to -65 outside the surface of the plane while crossing the atlantic ocean at night while going 500 mph and at 37,500 feet). The Amerstam airport was our only trip into the Netherlands, so I don't think it counts as a country we've visited. From the air it looks very pretty, and the airport was nice :) We got to rome and took the train into town, about a 30 minute ride.

A short battle with the ATM at the airport ended in defeat, luckly we had changed some money at our bank in Eagan before coming over. Everyone stayed awake for the majority of the trip over so we were pretty tired yesterday. We wanted to adjust to local time and had arrived just before noon, so we kept ourselves busy until the evening. That meant doing little thinks like finding our hotel (a short walk from Termini-the central train station), another ATM fight (we won that one), a casual tour of the National Museum of Rome, and an open air "trambus" tour of the city to get oriented (2 hours on the open air upper deck of a double decker bus).

Of course not everything went smoothly. Within 5 minutes of leaving termini to walk to our hotel some kids tried to rob tina. She had a small backpack on and we were dragging our luggage to the hotel (we were still carrying our luggage to the hotel) when they snuck up behind her and opened all the zippers on her pack. She felt the tugs and turned around, scaring them a short distance away. Alex and I were walking in front of her and missed all the action. She shouted for us to stop and we checked her bag. Nothing was missing and we had been warned about this kind of thing so we gave the kids the stink eye and moved on.

As far as impressions of the city, its hard to describe. Busy, crowded, and hot. Every horror story you've heard about the traffic is true, but they may have left out the number of scooters and the death defying moves they make in front of and around buses (it was fun watching them use the trambus we were on as a blocker at intersections, where the scooters would shoot around the bus and cut in front of it to make a corner). My cousin described rome as "I took one step off the train and realized no one here cares if I live or die". Probably true, and I was happy about it after the trambus ride. The heat, long hours awake, and stops and starts and traffic had made me very car sick. I got off the bus, found a nice tree (not an easy task in downtown rome) and dry heaved into the roots. Nobody seemed to care, per my cousins comment, but I was pretty happy about it at that point. After a bit of be sick I felt better and we went on to dinner and ended the day. Alex and Tina have been troopers, putting up with a lot of running around and long hours to get to a strange land. To reward alex for his patience, we had our first meal in Italy at a McDonalds (hey, I just threw up in front of the Train station, why not?). Actually, Tina and Alex had a meal. I had half a chicken nugget and felt like looking for another tree, so I decided to pass on the whole meal deal for the evening. We tried our lucky ATM again on the way back to the hotel and it denied us with a cryptic "we have been instructed to return your card". I was ok with that for the moment, so we went back to our room. We struggled to stay awake until 9 or 10 then decided we'd adjusted to the time zone and slept for the night.

Today we went to see the Colleseum, Roman Forum and Palentine Hill. We also learned how to navigate the Roman Subway and found this Internet Cafe on Piaza Barberini. My Internet card is running out of time, so I'll sign off for now and send another update later in the week.