Veni Vidi Vici!

So Nathan and I took a holiday to Italy this past week with our friends, the Scotts! And I took a million pictures that you can see here , here , here , and here , since I can't be bothered to upload them all onto the blog. and it'd be way too long anyway.
So travel day was Wednesday and everything went off without a hitch... until we got to Italy that is. We got off the plane and hopped on a bus to take the metro to our hotel. It was at this point that we separated from the Scotts temporarily, since they were going to Naples to see Chris's family, so we were sans an Italian speaker. Once we got to the metro, it was eeriliy empty. We (the five of us that got off the bus) were stopped at the entrance by Italian army dudes that told the Italian chick with us that the drivers were on strike. She scurried off, but we were left with two British girls without a clue what to do between us. We ended up waiting an hour in the rain for the bus to come back from the airport to take us BACK to the airport. Thank you Stacy and Claire from East London for making the best out of a crappy situation with us. Anyway, so once we got backt o the airport, there was really nothing we could do but get a taxi. Luckily for us (sarcasm) the hotel was SUPER far away and we had only 5 or so Euros on us. The taxi driver stopped by an ATM before dropping us off, so that was ok, but since I don't know how to say "No, I want change, I'm not giving you an 8 Euro tip" in Italian, we gave him 70 Euros that evening. Thanks Italy for the good first impression.

It was almost a perfect trip after that, thank goodness! We laughed it off (what else can you do?) and I just said to myself that if that's the worst thing to happen the whole trip, then I'm ok with it. Our hotel offers free breakfast, and it was SO GOOD every morning! I'm really gonna miss that bacon... I'm a crispy bacon girl, but this bacon was more like hot prosciutto than typical American bacon. So. Good. And they had little squares of what I call pizza without cheese. Whatever it was, I was excited to have pizza for breakfast! Nathan couldn't get enough of the blood orange juice. Seriously. If he could had hooked himself up to an IV and replaced his blood with blood orange juice, I think he would have.

I just wrote a whole paragraph on the breakfast. Yep.

Thursday, Nathan and I had the day to ROAM around ROME (yuk yuk). The metros were up and running (thank goodness, apparently that kind of thing happens all the time) and we just picked a spot to get off. "Barbarini - Fontana di Trevi looks good!" "Sure, we'll start there!" So the fountain isn't right there in front of you when you come out of the station. There's A fountain, but there's a fountain on every street. So we looked at a map, Nathan pointed us in the right direction, but I insisted he was wrong and we went the opposite way. I was wrong. But since we were on no kind of schedule, it was ok and we came accross a beautiful Basilica that we wouldn't have even known it existed otherwise! So yay for mistakes :) We did some more wandering and found the Piazza Venezia, which had the monument Il Vittoriano. GIANT BUILDING! It's a monument for who knows what (that's the thing about going to museums in another country, if you can't speak the language, it's harder to know what they're showing you. Not everything is in English too) and it served as the returning point whenever we didn't know quite where we were going. It has the best view of Rome after you climb A BILLION STAIRS. Seriously. So we finally found the Trevi fountain after that. It took my breath away! It's exciting to see things that are so famous and understand why. The way Nathan put it, it's cool when it's not just hype. It was more beautiful than any picture could make it look!

And it was at this point where I started getting annoyed with all the people trying to separate me from my money. There were guys EVERYWHERE selling scarves, camera tripods, squishy splatty toys, and other doo dads constantly trying to stop you and sell you things. At the Trevi Fountain, there are people trying to take your picture for money. You'll be sitting there trying to take in the beauty and someone just gets in your face and tries to seduce you with how you NEED for them to take your picture. We talked about this with the Scotts. We think these people have a warehouse somewhere full of crappy trinkets that they return to every night. I personally think they have toy/scarf pimps that they have to report back to. And wait til you hear about the Wish Thief. He comes later.

Breakfast got it's own paragraph, lunch should too. We saw people around the fountain with yummy sandwiches, so Nathan went up to someone and asked where they got it. We then proceeded to this little pizza place that had these DELICIOUS sandwich thingies! The bread was more like pizza crust and the insides were pepperoni, basil, and mozzerella. So. Good.

We found a museum behind the Piazza di Venezia (we were looking for something else, but we were having trouble finding it, so why not?). Nathan was drawn in by a giant statue we could see peeking at us from the exit door. Inside, there was a Leonardo Da Vinci painting! No pictures allowed, but it was incredible to see up close! We had a lot of fun seeing all the statues and artwork. It was funny because we'd be in awe by whatever was on the walls, then I'd say "Sweetie, look up" and there would be something more amazing on the ceiling.

We made our way back to the hotel (And I got hit on by an African guy who liked my hair, haha) and were too tired to go back out and get dinner. The hotel had vending machines, so we supped on Cipsters and Fonzies. Dinner of champions.

This is getting really long, so I'll just make each day a different post. More to come!