Rome!

First stop after the internship was Rome, Italy. The flight and train ride into the city were uneventful, but somehow I lost my notebook/diary which contained not only every personal thought and feeling since last January, but also my hostel address. After stamping around the train station a while, I managed to recall a map I'd seen showing where my youth hostel was in relation to the Vatican. From that and a metro map, I made it to the Il Cerchio youth hostel.

The Il Cerchio is family-staffed and generally fantastic. The grandmother of the place poured a glass of fresh orange juice for me a check in, and told me to help myself from a large fridge filled with goodies. I took a brief walk around the neighborhood, ate cheap pizza, and discovered that, in Rome, just 2 Euros will buy you four scoops of the greatest gelato in the world (whipped cream, chocolate syrup, and sugar cone included!).


The next day I visited the Vatican! It took three hours of standing in line to get in, but it was well worth it.


The Sistine Chapel is stunning. You aren't supposed to take pictures, but I did my best undercover work.



After the Vatican came the Roman Forum and the Colosseum. The scale of these things is unbelievable!


Roman hair-do in the Museum of Sculpture near the Forum.


I took a walk down to the "capital building."


Trevi Fountain. Toss one coin over your shoulder and you will return to Rome. Toss two, and you will fall in love with an Italian. Three coins gets you a wedding in Rome.



St. Peter's is now my definition of BIG.

The view from the top of St. Peters.


Some nuns, come to see the view from the boss's office.

The most at-home homeless person I've seen. He's set up shop in the road median and is reading the newspaper with his slippers off and drinking coffee. The life!

I ate dinner at a little hole-in-the-wall place recommended by both Lonely Planet and my hostel grandma. It served amazing Italian "home-style", which is pretty much spaghetti.

Getting out of Rome was challenging. A combination of a worker strike at the airport, my nonexistent Italian, and the presence of two airports in Rome, caused me to miss my flight. Unfortunately, easyJet makes it very clear that a missed flight is nonrefundable in any way, so I had to buy a full-price ticket to Madrid at the airport. Missing this flight meant I missed my train from Madrid to Cordoba, so the Cordoba trip was off. All in all, it took about $500 and a sleepless night to get me out of Rome and to my hostel in Granada.


On the positive side, I got to stay another day in Rome so I visited the Castel Sant'Angelo.


View from the top of the castle.

Miraculously, I found my diary in the train station on the way to the air port. All my reservations and other such papers had been taken, but the rest was fine. Whew!