Roma

The flight from Venice to Rome was only about an hour and I dozed most of the way. It was a much needed rest, but when we landed at Rome Leonardo da Vinci (Fiumicino) Airport (the official name of the Rome Airport) it was a little after 7:00 p.m. and I was still in that post nap haze.

Side note – I don’t think I mentioned that the Venice airport is name Venice Marco Polo airport. So we flew from Marco Polo to Leonardo da Vinci. I got a kick of these names – they don’t quite top Okalahoma City’s Will Rogers World airport – but they are high on my list. Now that I have digressed, back to the landing in Rome.

So once we landed we got off the plane, again we decided to exit the front since it was closer, although the thought of going out the back was appealing. We got down to the baggage claim area and found a couple of chairs to sit and wait in. We had been sitting there for a while and all of a sudden the chair Shannon was sitting in broke. One side of it snapped and crashed down. Shannon just continued to sit there (she was pretty tired at this point as well) and we just looked at each other. Meanwhile there was guy in a business suit standing not far from us who saw the whole thing go down. He was trying so hard not to laugh, turned his back to us and started playing with his phone. Until Shan and I busted out laughing our heads off over what had happened. He then felt the freedom to laugh too. It was hilarious.

Here is the picture of the broken chair.

While we were waiting we also used the airport restroom and it was dirty and nasty and did not have a toilet seat – welcome to the public restrooms in Italy. We then got our luggage and made our way over to the train station in the airport. We needed to take the Leonardo Express from the airport, which is located in Fiumicino, to Termini, the central train station in Rome. The train takes about 30 minutes. We got to the station, bought our tickets and thankfully the train was there for us to board. We got our luggage on and were pretty much comatose for the ride.

When we got to the train station, the train was the furthest away from the main part of the station and it took forever for us to drag our luggage through the terminal. When we finally got to the exit we needed to figure out where our hostel was located. We had chosen our hostel based on its proximity to Termini. The hostel we book was called Friends Hostel. It is located just a few blocks away from the station, but we had to go to another location, owned by the same people called Liliput and Friends. To call this places hostels is really inaccurate, basically the owners took a 3 bedroom flats and rented each room out, like a bed and breakfast. The nice thing about this set up was that we had a room to ourselves. Of course by the time we left the train station it was dusk and we were once again trying to find our way around a city we had never been to before in the dark. Outside the station the traffic was kind of crazy, the sidewalks small, there were puddle from a recent rain, and we didn’t know where we were going. It was another fun time lugging our luggage in the dark in a strange city. By this point we were really happy to know we had two nights in the same location. Thankfully the Hostel was only a few blocks away. As we approached the building there was a man sitting outside on a scooter waiting for us. He was one of the owners ready to check us in. We expected him to bring us over to the Friends Hostel, but instead he brought us up to Liliput and Friends. We really didn’t care that this was not the Hostel we had booked – we were getting the same type of room for the same price and we did not have to go any further.

The hostel was on the 3rd floor of the building, and thankfully it had an elevator. The elevator was very small, old and basically only one of us and our luggage fit in at a time. It was our first experience with this type of elevator, but not our last.

The owner was really nice, told us about the neighborhood- gave us a tourist map with all the major attractions and told us how to get places. Told us where we could find an internet café and where we could store our luggage etc. I would totally recommend this place to anyone.

Here is the sitting/common area

The bathroom Our room

My bed

As you can see it is pretty small – basically the room had two beds and a small dresser and very little walking room. Thankfully there was some extra room under the window, behind the curtains – that is where I put my suitcase. Over all it was fine for us.

These are the keys – one for our room, one for the flat, one for the front door of the building and one for the front gate.

No worries about someone breaking in – it would take way too much effort.

Once we got all checked in we decided to walk back towards the train station to the McDonald’s there to grab a quick bite to eat. It was pretty busy and the first time I saw a pastry case/counter in a McDonalds. I just got a regular hamburger and fries and some sprit, since Italy had Coke Light, which I didn’t drink. Shannon tried the McToast – a ham and cheese sandwich – which was okay.

After we ate we decided to call it a night and headed back to the hostel. I needed to take a shower, but there was already someone in the bathroom. I actually had to wait quite a while to get into the bathroom, but was thankful for a warm shower and ready to get some sleep. We had a very busy day the next day starting with the Vatican in the morning.