First Day in Rome

This is my first blog post on my trip to Rome–my goal is to do one a day through the end of the week, and try not to bore anyone with pictures. :-p Therefore, if you go to my Flickr gallery, you can see more pictures there–this is by no means all of them (scary, I know.)

John and I left San Francisco on Saturday 11/21 and flew to Rome to meet up with Joel!, a college friend of mine, pilot, and world traveler who lives in Hong Kong. Before anyone wonders why the superfluous exclamation point next to Joel!’s name, it just has to be there — I’ve been writing it like that since college and I don’t plan to stop now.

The flight to Rome wasn’t bad, but an eleventh-hour itinerary change left me a bit annoyed. We were supposed to leave San Francisco at 6AM on Saturday and get to Rome 7:45 AM on Sunday (meshing almost perfectly with Joel!’s schedule, as he was supposed to get in at 7:20 from Hong Kong.) However, when I got home from work on Friday, I checked my email and found an email from Orbitz (the company I’d bought the tickets through), and they’d changed our itinerary. This was the FIFTH time this’d happened, so I was annoyed, and I was even more annoyed to learn that we now had a five hour layover in Boston and wouldn’t be getting to Rome until almost noon. Lame.

But honestly, that was the only really annoying part. Even being stuck in the center row didn’t faze me (although I did miss looking out the window on takeoff and landing.)

We got to Rome and took the train in to meet up with Joel! at a cafe across from the front of Stazione Termini, the main station in Rome. There was something odd about walking into a Roman cafe and meeting up with a friend from California but who now lives halfway around the world… I thought maybe it was just me, but Joel! and John both made the same comment. So fun, though. :-)

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Joel! had already checked into the hotel, so we walked over there, dropped our stuff off, and headed out to wander and see what we could see before we all dropped dead from fatigue.

Our hotel was a small (how’d you put it Joel? Cozy?) place a couple of blocks outside of the city wall, and “near Termini” (which is, as we learned, a fairly relative concept–that train station is one of the largest in Europe, and measures two kilometers in length. Geez.)

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The Aurelian Wall (city wall) and Porta Tiburtina, two blocks from our hotel.

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What was really neat to me was how they built newer buildings right on top of the ancient city wall. Crazy!!

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Well, we wandered around for a while that afternoon, but unfortunately my camera decided to make about 50 pictures magically disappear (I just realized this yesterday when I went to start processing them!) so I have nothing to show for our wanderings. I will tell you that we went to see the Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore, but unfortunately you’ll have to check it out on Wikipedia, since those pictures are gone. I’m so sad about this. That place has 1500-year-old mosaics!! So neat!! Sigh… :-p

After that, we headed down toward the Colosseum so that we could see it at night. It’s funny — I never thought of Rome as being all that far north. In fact it’s only a bit over 3 degrees north of Sacramento, and it’s over 4 degrees south of Seattle. But in terms of day length/light quality, the difference was really noticeable to me. In the mornings, it seemed like early morning until around noon, then all of a sudden it seemed like later afternoon. The sun was never really directly overhead. Or maybe that was me just really being sensitive to it.

Anyway, we stopped briefly for dinner at a wholly unmemorable pizzeria with embarrassingly bad bruschetta (dry burnt toast with tomatoes… at least the tomatoes were really good, but dude, they could have at least put olive oil on the burnt toast), found some gelato good enough to atone for the disappointing dinner (dark chocolate orange=SO GOOD) and then wandered down to see the Colosseum at night. It was absolutely beautiful.

Colosseum, Arch of Constantine, moon, and Venus, with the last faint glow of the sunset on the horizon.

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I like this shot better, except that it doesn't have the Arch of Constantine in it.

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John's and my shadows on some ankle-breaking cobblestones in front of the Arch of Constantine. My biggest problem with the wide angle lens I rented was that I kept getting my shadow, and sometimes my toes! in the shots. Whoops. But this was intentional, obviously.

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Owners of the shadows, happy to be in Rome.

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Arco di Constantino and Joel!'s hand. I had a shot of this without his hand, but I decided this one was infinitely more amusing. :-) Oh, and let me just say this -- the wide angle lens ROCKED. I think I was standing about 10 feet from the fence and maybe 20 feet from the arch when I took this.

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Joel!, opting to keep his hands in his pockets and out of the picture for once. :-)

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After the Colosseum, we took the metro back up to Termini, then walked back to the hotel from there.

Funny story… When Joel! called me the day before we left so that we could figure out where we were going to meet up (since the airport was now out of the question as our flight got changed) he looked up our hotel on Google Street View, and he was a bit concerned about its neighborhood. In his words, “There’s graffiti EVERYWHERE and police tape around it.” After I stopped laughing, I told him that I couldn’t speak for the police tape (and our hotel actually ended up being in a pretty decent neighborhood) but that ANYTHING in Rome that stood still for too long eventually got graffitied. The exceptions seem to be personal vehicles and church walls.

The reason I opted to tell this story (besides the fact that I found it funny) was because of the picture I took of the metro.

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I meant to come back later and take a panning, longer exposure of this, but I never did get around to it. Oh well, next time. :-)

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Back at the hotel, John decided to “rest his eyes for a moment”, and Joel! and I sat and talked for a couple of hours before deciding to call it a night. And thus ended my first day in Rome. :-)