Day 2: Vacation

Day 2 – Rome

I will codename this day Operation GELATO.

Thursday started out just like Wednesday ended…HOT! So, like any good tourist we planned our day in accordance with gelato pit stops. Guido from Cars would be very proud of our planning. 

Rough draft of day:

Morning – Coliseum, Roman Forum, Gelato

Afternoon – Vatican, St. Peter’s Basilica, Gelato

Evening – Piazza Novano (again), Ristorante Lagano, and of course Gelato

Here is what actually happened.

Breakfast consisted of rolls, croissants, and concentrated juice. I really mean concentrated. They forgot to tell me to dilute the juice with bottled water and so instead I had an Espresso version of blood orange juice. We all started the day with showers, which I can’t say happened everyday, and a lot of Nutella croissants. 

Our first stop on Prison Chin’s tour was the Coliseum. We had passed it the day before on our crazy taxi ride and I was super excited to get a close-up view. The few things I can say about the coliseum was that it was big, hot, incredibly gruesome, and one of the weirdest spots in Rome. Definitely worth the stop, but it has a very different feel from everything else. 

The second stop of the day was the Forum. Gordie had printed out a list of Top 10 things to see in Rome and the Forum was numero UNO. Unfortunately, none of us had done any research on it, so after walking around rocks, basically, for about an hour and almost taking naps in historic ruins, we left without knowing anything more than when we entered. The Foro as the locals call it did inspire one thing…a run at a Gelateria. Hayley had picked out a famous Gelateria in Rome, but had forgotten to look up where it was. By this time we were all hot (hot in body and in the head), and so we wandered around for some time before we ended up all crouched around an air conditioning unit in a tourism kiosk wishing we all spoke Italian. The cashier at the kiosk turned out to be a Roman Google and pointed us in the right direction. Unfortunately, we had run out of time for gelato so we decided to grab a little bite to eat.

Here begins the middle ages of our trip. In Rome there are about 1 billion ristorantes and of those 1 billion we just happened to pick the only one run by Ukranians. Amber enjoyed a warmed up microwave pizza, Noel had the 4 euro can of coke, and Prison Chin had a flashback to prison with his Italianized gruel. 70 euros later and we were ready to head back to the hotel to purge and get ready for a great afternoon.  

And it was a great afternoon. We spent nearly 3 hours touring the Vatican museum and being blown away by the depth and enormity of its collections. The self-guided tours start with the Egyptian collection and I should have known after seeing two real mummies that the Vatican was anything other than normal. I will let the pictures speak for me.

 

 

After the Vatican we walked along the Tiber on our way to Gelateria Giolitti, stopped to take pictures, bought some gummies from a street vendor, and realized how tired we were. 

The journey was well worth it and we thoroughly enjoyed our gelato.

After gelato we made our way back to Piazza Novano and eventually to Ristorante Lagano. Amber had a plate full of pasta and seafood (heads, eyes, and bums included) and Noel about blew out his esophagus with a spicy plate of pasta Arrabiatta. 

Following dinner we walked back through all the little streets between Piazza Novano and the Pantheon on our way to a bus stop. Eventually we found one, but it took us some time before we realized we were waiting for a bus that only ran on the weekends. With the crisis averted, we made our way back to the hotel.

Day 2 Rome – Awesome! and Hot! (mostly because of Noel’s hot body).