"Not in here. No photos in here!"
"Delete them and show me!"
Yes, that's how we were greeted once we set foot in Rome. Rude Italians? Definitely. Loud and rude. And that happened at the airport, in the terminal to be specific. We got yelled at by the security for taking pictures of the advertisements. All eyes were on us. It was so embarrassing! There wasn't any 'No Photo' sign. If there were, we would have understood and wouldn't have done so. Our first impression of Italians was obviously not a good one. It dampened our spirit a little.
Hopped on a shuttle bus and made our way to the city center. Along the way, the scenery we saw from the airport to the Termini (Rome's central train station), was pretty disappointing. We kinda had high expectations of Rome. It has a lot of nice buildings but they were not well kept. Most were vandalized with graffities and trash cans were everywhere. Compared to Paris, Rome was quite dirty. Once we arrived at the Termini, we took a metro to our hostel. It's just two stations away. We stayed at Ciak Hostel, which I highly recommend for budget travellers and backpackers. The rooms are clean and it comes with breakfast, maybe dinner once in a while and the workers are super friendly! The best part is, it's not far from the majestic Colosseum! Checked-in, took a free map from the reception and decided to explore a little while waiting for Annie to arrive. Annie, is a French exchange student in Pavia, a small city in the north of Italy.
We took a walk, our intention was to explore the neighbourhood, but it's true what they say, we find things easily when we're not looking. So voilà! The huge magnificent Colosseum, right in front of us! It's gigantic I actually gawked at it! I must have had the same look when I first saw the Eiffel Tower almost eight years ago. It was very very impressive to see a 2000-year-old artifact still stands (somewhat) strong! And the size of it! We didn't go inside as it was already late and the queue was unbelieavably long. So we had ice cream and went back to the hostel to wait for Annie.
When she arrived, we made plans where to go first. We took the metro to Barberini and headed to Fontana di Trevi. It's a beautiful, beautiful fountain! We threw coins and made wishes.
We walked a little bit more until we reached the immense Monumento Nazionale a Vittorio Emanuele II :
Climbed up and saw Roma from above. Afterwards, we traveled through the history of Rome at the Time Elevator, with simulated ride. It was fun. We had dinner at Hard Rock Cafe later that night as we were too tired to look for some place else to eat. After dinner, everyone was overwhelmed with fatigue to continue the journey so we decided to call it a day.
Day two, three and four are to be continued. Stay tuned!
Listening to : Parachute - Train
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