Who goes out for Chinese food in Rome?

We turned from the Wedding Cake monument and started on our way. Shannon had intended to walk all the way back to the hostel, but I had just had enough. My poor feet were not happy with me. They were just not used to having shoes on and now had blisters on top of blisters and bruises. After walking all day long, I just was done. Plus we had purchased a day long pass for all the public transportation; we might as well use it. So I had a mini break down and insisted we take a bus back. We quickly found the correct bus stop and got on the bus.

I have to say my little fit worked out for the best. Midway through our ride back to the transit station it started to pour. Had we been walking we would have gotten caught in the middle of it and had been drenched. We both just look at each other and were very thankful we were on the bus. We got back to Termini and walked the few blocks to the hostel.

When we got back to the hostel we decided to take a little rest before we went to dinner. I pealed my shoes off my feet, another day of walking around and not drinking enough made my feet so swollen and bruised; I did not even recognize them. They looked even worse then my right foot had looked the year before when I needed to get tested for a blood clot. Since that test had come back negative, I figured it was just from the strain of the past few days. Not to mention the lack of water. On a regular day at home I drink 1 – 2 liters of water plus other stuff, but due to the fact that I was buying all my water and not drinking any of the local water, and water was not cheap, I had only been drinking a fraction of what I normally drink. I had also been eating a lot of salty food and my body did not know what to do and I was not sure how to fix it. So I called my Mom. Until this point I had only communicated via email, but needed to talk to my Mom. After a few minutes on the phone I felt a whole lot better at least emotionally and took my Mom’s advice to lay down with my feet up for a while.

After we rested for a while we got ready to go to dinner. We had heard from more than one person, including the owner of the hostel that we should go to the Trastevere area for dinner. This is an area with lots of good, authentic places to eat. We walked towards the bus station to catch a ride over to Trastevere and along the way passed a Chinese restaurant. We both kind of paused and I think it was Shan who said, Chinese food sounds good, I have not had it in forever. I agreed it sounded good and Shan said do you just want to go there instead of going over to Trastevere. By this point we had been going non-stop for 5 days and this was the first night we were not traveling somewhere. This would be our first chance to actually have a sit down dinner somewhere. Part of me wanted to go have an authentic Italian meal, but a bigger part of me was happy to not go any further and just have Chinese. So we decided to go in.

Here is Ristorante Hong Kong. We got seated right away and decided to order a couple of meals to split. We also had to order our rice separately and split a bottle of water. While we were sitting we talked about how ridiculous it was that we were eating Chinese food in Rome – who does that? So we decided to take pictures with our food to commemorate it.

Here is Shannon digging in Me showing off our yummy dinner As good as our food was, I was equally as excited to be drinking the amount of water we got with dinner.

After we finished we walked over to the other side of the train station to find the hostel we would be stay at after the cruise. I also grabbed another bottle of water. At this point I decided I should have put a line item in my budget for water.

On our way back to our hostel we stopped at the internet café our hostel owner had told us about and we spend some time online catching up on emails and facebook. I did quick log in to my work email just to check a couple details on my boss’ trip that I was concerned about. Once I saw those had been taken care of, I did not check into work again.

We then headed back to the hostel to call it a night. Tomorrow was going to be a great day – the coliseum and forum in the morning and then to the port to get on our cruise ship for the next 12 days. We both were so ready to unpack and settle into one location for a while.