Monday, March 7, 2011

Reunited in Rome

What a great weekend we had in Rome!  Elizabeth and Claire came from France, Sara and Charlotte from Spain and Virginia from Florence.  We had them all stay in the hotel that is located on the first floor of our apartment building, which was a perfect location!

Elizabeth, Claire, Sara and Virginia arrived on Thursday evening.  I went and picked them up from the train station since Ellis still had Italian class.  We again cooked them dinner in our apartment since we knew they would be tired from traveling that day. It was our usual meal of chicken, pasta, salad and wine.  Ellis and I had a bit of a buzzkill the next morning because we had to be at school by 9am for a field trip on Friday (even though we dont normally have any classes on Friday).  We hated to leave them for the day, but they figured out how to navigate through some of Rome on their own.  Our field trip was to two different archeological sites where they have found Etruscan tombs.  The first site wasnt too impressive, but I really enjoyed the second.  It was a little bit creepy to think of these dead bodies being all around us.

We got back to our apartment around 5pm Friday and Sara and Elizabeth had just been to the station to pick up Charlotte!  We all went out to eat at our favorite restaurant Friday night called Da Gildo.  Everyone of course ordered pizza or pasta!  We woke up early Saturday to get in a full day of sightseeing.  But not before we ate lunch at the best pizza restaurant Dar Poeta!  Our first stop was to the Colosseum.  We bought tickets and went inside, even though it was raining outside.  We had lots of funny encounters with people inside of the Colosseum.  One of them was with two Asian boys who wanted to take a picture with us.  They held up a sign with numbers on it, but we could not figure out what it meant.  We laughed so hard at that! 

Next stop was the Roman Forum and then off to the Vatican!  We tried to get into the Sistine Chapel but we got there a few minutes too late.  Saturday night, everyone was exhausted, so we cooked in again.  After dinner we walked to the Trevi fountain and just enjoyed each others company. 

Everyone but Charlotte left early Sunday morning.  We had quite the experience taking Charlotte to the train station to catch the bus to the airport!  As Charlotte and I are standing in line to buy her bus ticket, an italian woman cuts us in line and shoves her two tickets in the checker lady's face.  The checker answered her but the woman kept asking her things.  Finally she got so mad at the checker that she threw all of the pamplets and boxes off of the counter at the checker, knocking down her computer and scratching her arm.  Finally the checker lady called the Police and they came to help her.  Our eyes were as wide as they could go as we watched the whole thing happen in front of us!  Who in the world would act like that over a ticket?!

We finally get Charlotte her ticket and send her off (with tears on my end).  As if that wasn't enough drama for one night, we are sitting on the bus outside of the train station to come home, when a man walks up to us and exposes himself!  We nearly died!  He was literally less than a foot away from us!  We immediately turned away and he walked off the bus.  We thought he was gone, but when we looked out of the window of the bus, he was standing right outside the window of the bus staring at us and still exposing himself.  There are just some times when you have to say "When in Rome, do NOT do as the Romans do!"

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