New Year's Eve in Rome, Italy

Thursday, December 31, 2009

Upon arriving at the Rome train station, we found our way to our hostel after a few misguided loops around the blocks. Nice because it was actually only a block away from the train station. Pensione Giamaica was on the 4^th floor of a non-descriptive building, and we were greeted at the locked door by a big barking dog. An old woman came to answer the door, didn’t speak English, and seemed to nearly threaten to not have us because we didn’t have the printout of our reservation. Say what?? Finally after a quick phone call on her part, the man who actually ran the place came to our rescue. He spoke English in a thick accent, was very talkative and helpful, and showed us to our cute little lime green room. He chattered all the while about how if we go out for New Year’s, there’s a free concert by the Coliseum that we should go to and stay at for a few minutes before and after midnight because it’s traditional for people to throw old household items out their windows at midnight. It was also the time when guys liked to pull out guns in their revelry. Uhh… Once the concert was over, it was also traditional for people to make the trek across the city to the piazza square, where I guess more festivities occured.

A few minutes after we settled in, he brought us a tray containing huge pieces of cake and two glasses of wine. What is it with Italians offering wine as a welcome gift? I guess that is kind of their trademark. The cake was delicious, packed with raisins and dusted sugar, and we ate every crumb. Thanks for our second (meager) meal of the day! After eating this and unpacking, we decided (or maybe I decided) that we were tired enough that a nap sounded really good before heading out for the festivities. So we set our alarm for 9:30pm and had a great and much-needed nap.

The trek to the Coliseum was a bit of a failure. That particular metro stop was closed off, I suppose to avoid congestion. Tons of people were out and about, and the holiday spirit was apparent in the whistling, whooping, and hollering of several of the young locals. It made me wish I spoke Italian so I could feel more a part of the fun. We made two misguided stops on the metro due to this non-existent Coliseum stop, and finally just decided to wing it on foot by following our map and the locals. It was raining off and on by this point, and it was a pain trying to compete with so many umbrellas. To make a long story short, after several wrong turns and changing of minds, we made it to the concert area 20 minutes before midnight, and pushed our way through the thousands of people as close to the front as we could get. It was impossible to get to the very front, as by this point everyone was pushed so tightly together you couldn’t get through even if you wanted to. I didn’t even have to hold myself up. The concert was in Italian of course, and everyone around us was singing merrily along. The spirit was catching, but like I said, the language barrier kind of dampered the fun for me. The countdown started at 66 seconds, and the huge chant arose as people got their wine bottles and glasses ready. I was taking pictures with our nice camera, and at the midnight strike Shane and I didn’t get to kiss because I was frantically trying to stuff the camera in his coat to avoid the shower of wine being sprayed up into the air all around us. As a result my white and only coat now has purple spots all over it, which I have a feeling won’t ever come out. Pictures thereafter sport a red trickle of wine running down my throat, which I never knew was there. It looks slightly like blood. Haha.

After the countdown and the rain of wine, the fireworks began, both in the sky and on the ground. Those on the ground miraculously cleared a huge gap in the crowd—how, I don’t know—but the ones in the sky were gorgeous. We got several pictures, but none of them are spectacular, as trying to take pictures of fireworks is always hard.

The crowd began slightly dispersing after this and a huge circle became the fireworks/bottle dump. Tons of bottles were thrown into the center, followed by fireworks loud enough to cause you to go deaf. Shane and I walked around the perimeter taking pictures of the merrymakers and the ruins of Rome. Empty or half-empty wine bottles littered the streets everywhere, and vendors sold them on the curbs. Finally, when the chill of the air started to penetrate even my two layers of coats, we headed back to our hostel, dodging broken bottles and vomit. We saw 3 abandoned high heeled shoes along the way, and a few homeless guys huddled in doorways with a line of those half-empty wine bottles. Merry Christmas to them! Our stomachs were very hungry by now, and we searched for open restaurants on the way. Hardly any were open anymore, and by the time we got back to our hostel we had given up finding any hot food worth eating. We made do by buying two apples and a bottle of water, supplementing it with our pistachios and cookies left over from Christmas dinner. This satisfied us enough and we went to sleep around 2:30am.

In the morning we awoke, talked for a bit, and I decided to go back to sleep for a while because I still felt exhausted. We set the alarm for around noon, and settled back into our beds. I’m not sure whether I heard the alarm go off or not, but Shane never woke me up, and I never woke him up. As a result, we both woke up around 4:30 in the afternoon!! Our whole day had been wasted by sleeping! I couldn’t believe what a lazy bum I had been, but I just felt sooo tired! This was supposed to be our sightseeing day, and I felt bad that I had kept Shane from seeing Rome. We decided then to stay one more night in Rome, sightsee the next day, then continue on our journey without coming back for Epiphany.

Needless to say, our activities this day were minimal. We went to the train station and bought reservations for a train to Naples on Sunday morning. We decided to go there, then take the commuter train to Pompeii, then a little farther south to Sorrento, where we would stay the night. With this taken care of, food was next on our mind. We went to a little pizza and pasta restaurant and had, you guessed it, Margarita pizza, along with spinach ravioli. The pizza was lacking compared to the other two I’ve had, and the ravioli was different, but good. There wasn’t very much of either, but it filled us up. We paid 17 Euro for this meal, including the sitting fee. Shane is already losing weight, and I’m sure I’m not far behind!

From here we tried to find free internet but to no avail. The two McDonald’s the train station sported required an Italian cell phone for the password, which of course we didn’t have. We finally sighed at our loss and paid for 20 minutes of internet at a café, where we made reservations for what promises to be a great little hostel in Sorrento. With all the important things completed, we headed back to our hostel, looked at the pictures we’d taken thus far, and settled in to sleep a mere 8 hours after we last got up.

And off we go!

Note: The next two blogs actually happened a couple days ago…I haven’t had internet connection recently so I just now got around to posting them.

Tuesday, December 29, 2009

Our flight began with discovering we were sitting much farther back in the plane than we expected, and not having any space for our luggage in the overhead compartments…I had to stick mine in the next row over, which meant being one of the last people off the plane. Thank goodness for international flights having individual video screens in front of you to watch movies in case you suffer from insomnia. Like me. I managed to evade sleep (unwillingly) for the entire 9 hour flight, which was during my night time. By the time we arrived in London, it was 1 pm their time and I had to do another whole day over again without any sleep. An hour into our flight we were served a surprisingly tasty meal of 3-cheese pasta, a roll, taboulli-type salad, and blueberry cake. After finishing our meal we were all served Earl Gray tea in actual teacups—the tea I came to love when living in Poland but hadn’t had since. Yay for British flights! This was all done at 10:00 at night. A mere 6 hours later in the “morning” we were served breakfast, which consisted of a soggy turkey ham & cheese sandwich, yogurt, orange juice, and a tiny packet of granola to convert our yogurt into a parfait. Due to the fact that I hadn’t slept off my supper like everyone else, I wasn’t the least bit hungry and only had a few bites of yogurt and my orange juice.

My exhaustion diminished a bit once the sun came up and we were allowed to raise the window shades. Because our first flight was delayed 2 hours, we were able to get to our next connection to Milan and leave with hardly any waiting time, aside from the blessed 10 minutes I spent in the bathroom brushing my teeth and washing my face. The plane to Milan was much less packed, and Shane and I were able to both store our luggage close to us, as well as have the third seat next to us to ourselves. I utilized this by stretching out and getting as close to sleep as I got on the entire trip. Unfortunately by the time our 1.5 hour flight was over, Shane and I were both exhausted, and all we wanted was a bed to sleep in.

The search for luggage storage in the Milan Linate airport was a pain. After some confusing directions we finally found it. Through a sign and a non-English-speaking Italian, we discovered it costs 3.50 Euro per day, per bag…until the next day. Then it would rise to 7.00 Euro due to the holiday season. We debated on it and decided to go find our hostel in the hopes than maybe it would offer luggage storage too. At least we would save 3.50 Euro for the night we wouldn’t be storing it.

The trip to our hostel is another story. After buying tickets for bus 73, we hopped on and enjoyed the ride to….what stop again? The fast-speaking driver on the loudspeaker wasn’t very useful in announcing the street names, and often the electronic signs on the bus stops were out of order. Eventually I decided to make use of the curious woman staring at me from across the aisle, and asked her if she knew which stop to get off at, according to the street we needed. She kindly used her small bit of English to let us know how many more stops it would be, and we hopped off. One more hurdle down. The directions the hostel posted on the website were lacking a bit, telling us to keep walking (but what direction??) until we got to the Supermarket “Simple.” We were confused whether we were supposed to walk down the main street or go down the one we were dropped off at. We continued walking down the main busy street until we had almost convinced ourselves that we were going the wrong way. Thankfully Shane and his keen eyes saw a woman walking by with shopping bags from Simple, and we asked her and her English-speaking companion where it was. All we had to do was keep walking a little farther down the street we were on. Upon finding it, we read the directions for the hotel further. “You should see the sign for Hotel Rossovino directly across from the supermarket.” We looked across the street. Really? We’re supposed to be able to see a hotel sign in that row of dark, typical concrete unmarked buildings? We walked farther down the street. Maybe it was across from the end of the supermarket. Nope. Are our eyes just really bad? We walked across the street and traversed up and down the sidewalk. I surmised that it had to be in a certain small block of buildings since there were only so many across from the supermarket, but for the life of me I never saw a sign of any kind. Finally a man passed us, eyed us and our huge trail of bags, and said “hotel” and pointed behind us. Behind us was what looked like a gate that you see going into private apartment complexes, only it was another type of private street with buildings and apartments on either side. I hadn’t figured that the hotel would be down there since the directions said “you will see the hotel.” But since the man seemed to know what he was talking about, and it was freezing, we took his advice.

Sure enough, building 9 housed Hotel Rossovino, a brand new, fairly plush for cheap European standards hotel. The youngish guy at the front desk spoke good English and was very helpful. This was the hotel where we had been able to reserve a private room and bathroom, which was nice since we were exhausted. We were handed a huge, old-fashioned castle dungeon-like key complete with a huge tassel, and a bottle opener, because apparently they give you a bottle of wine in your room just for booking it. Since we don’t drink wine I stashed it in my bag to either sell or give to someone who would appreciate it more than me. To our delight we were told that we could store our luggage downstairs there for a few days free of charge, all they wanted was a good review. Thank goodness we didn’t pay for storage at the airport! Our room was small but cute, with lush burgundy colors and an itsy bitsy bathroom. Complete with a blow drier for your hands, no towel. The floors were unfortunately tile and cold, and the entire hotel was so bare and basic that it echoed every sound. I hoped that the huge racket coming from the entry-way, about 10 feet from our room, would settle down by bedtime. If all else failed, I had my trusty earplugs.

Speaking of bedtime, it had been mine for the past 12-ish hours. I felt I couldn’t even enjoy being back in Europe because I was so exhausted. But we still had to eat and go to the train station to check the schedule for departures to Rome. The bus ride to the train station was simple enough, and we trooped through the huge cold cavernous building looking for a train schedule. There was none, other than immediate departures. We found the ticket counter for future use in the morning, and even late at night there was a huge mass of people waiting to get on various trains. I guess everyone decided to get out of Milan for New Year’s. The thought occurred to me that we should buy our reservations then, but Shane didn’t have his Eurail pass with him and for some reason it didn’t really hit me that morning trains might already be booked. Instead we looked up train times on the automated ticket machine. It seemed one left every hour for Rome.

We left the train station and found a cute little restaurant across from it that served Asian and Italian cuisine. We ordered tomato & basil pasta and a margarita pizza, which I knew would be good based on my previous experience in Rome. Sure enough, I loved both of them. There is no way to describe how good Italian pizza is to me. I don’t even really like pizza. Every time I have the opportunity to have it in the US I usually decline. I just don’t see the hype over it. But Italian margarita pizza? Mmm! I could eat it every day. The pasta was excellent too, simply because it wasn’t drenched in sauce, which I have never liked either. Can you tell that Italian food in the US really isn’t my favorite? We ordered water with our meal, and it came in a large bottle. Thankfully it wasn’t the notorious bubbly European water. After our meal I took the half-empty bottle and stashed it in my bag, but the waitress came over and told us that we pay by ounce—if we wanted the entire bottle we had to pay 15 Euros. Interesting. We apparently drank 2 Euros worth. We also were charged an automatic service charge of 3 Euros. Still more interesting. Total, we paid 12.80 for our meal, which comes out to around $18-19. Quite a bit more than I was used to paying for my European meals 3 years ago, but it was worth it to me.

After the delicious meal, we got the joyous task of trying to figure out which bus would take us back to our hostel. The maps on the bus stops were not helpful. Finally we made a decision between the two candidates and proceeded to stand around in the cold for seemingly forever, waiting for it to arrive. Once back at our hostel we took showers, re-packed our travel backpacks for Rome, and blessedly crawled into bed. I slept like a log, never even changing positions throughout the night. Early in the morning the echoey-ness of the hotel came to haunt me in the form of two loud chattery girls leaving who apparently don’t know the meaning of respect-the-sleeping. I put in my ear plugs and went back to sleep until it was time to get up at 8:00.

Thursday, December 31, 2009—New Year’s Eve

After getting ready and securing our bags with what few locks we had, we went to the front desk to claim what they had said was a free breakfast delivered to our room. There was no one at the desk. Great. No free breakfast, and no one to tell us what to do with our bags for storage. We must have waited around there for nearly an hour. There was no bell to ring for service. A phone sat on the desk for guests to use but any instructions for calling the desk worker there may have been were in Italian. I don’t even think there were any. Since the guy the night before had said that it was a 24-hour desk, I was beginning to think my good review of them in exchange for luggage storage might go down a notch or two. What if we had had a specific train ticket instead of a Eurail pass? Finally when we were about ready to leave our bags behind the front desk with a note, a girl walked in the door. Did she work here? Si! Did she speak English? No! Wonderful. While I finished securing the bags, Shane used our internet service to find an online translator, where he wrote a message saying we were told we could leave our bags there, could she please help us do that? Upon going back to the front desk, we discovered she was gone. What? What kind of 24-hour desk was this? We waited another 10 minutes or so until she got back from the supermarket with what I assume was her breakfast. Well what about ours?? After reading Shane’s translated message, she nodded, Si, we could store them. She pointed down, and we assumed she meant we could take them downstairs like the guy had said, which turned out to be a slightly creepy concrete basement with basically a bunch of dusty junk in it. Strange of them to make us store them down here, but I guess it’s free so what can you expect? Halfway through sweeping out a spot for them in a corner of one of the 3 rooms, the girl came down the stairs. No, no! Upstairs! she gestured. Well now I felt dumb. Here we were traipsing down into the “Private” abandoned basement to leave our belongings. Taking us back upstairs, she indicated that we should just leave the bags in our room. Um. “But it’s for 7 days.” I used my fingers in case that helped. “Oooh 7 days…” She pursed her lips as she finally understood the predicament we had been trying to get her to understand all along. She made a couple phone calls and came back, telling us in a flurry of Italian that we could still leave them in the room. Whether they would leave them there or move them later, we didn’t know. But at least when we left she locked that room. I just hope someone is there when we get back to give them back to us!

Thankful that we finally resolved one more issue, we took the bus to the train station again and stood in the long line to activate our Eurail passes and buy reservations. Reservations cost us $30 round-trip, and all the trains were booked until one at 2:00. It was only 10:00. Lame of us to not consider the fact that they would all be booked because of New Year’s. But even worse, what would we do for 4 hours in the cold? Breakfast was #1 on our minds, and we traipsed down the streets around the train station looking for a suitable place. Nothing seemed to be open except for bars (which seem to double as coffee shops and cafes) and small pastry shops. We finally bought a small cinnamon-bread-like thing and went into one of the bars for hot chocolate. Man I missed the hot chocolate here! It’s the consistency of thick gravy, and I’m sure is actual melted chocolate with milk added. Delicious. We ate this small portion of food and it filled us up enough to be content for the time being.

The remainder of the 3-hour wait was spent sitting on the floor in the ticket area of the train station, which was the warmest part but still severely lacking. Once our train arrived we followed the mass of people, got help on how to know which train car was ours, and have settled in for the 3-ish hour ride to Rome. The past 20 minutes have annoyingly been tunnels, which make my ears plug up and pop unrelentlessly. Enviously, Shane is having a peaceful sleep beside me.

I realize this has been very long. Hopefully I can post shorter, more frequent posts later on.