We landed in Rome without mishap albeit with minor delay and straight off I made a mistake: instead of waiting around at the airport for my booked hotel transfer I went to the taxi stand to see whether my driver would be there and got flagged by a black cab. Result: charged 180 Euro instead of the 65 Euro fixed rate. On top of that, the hotel closed down making us stranded ‘homeless’ in Rome! Tried to ask around for another hotel nearby but apparently there was a tennis match resulting in a short supply of hotel rooms so at the end we took up on the offer of the lady who had a design studio next to the closed down hotel who had a room to rent with a private bathroom. That took most of the morning (we landed at around 8:15am but the hassle of finding alternative accommodation lasted until lunch time).
We ended up not having lunch or rather making do with gelato as lunch. Straight away we could tell a difference between Oceania and Italy: they do not press down on the ice cream cones so that at the end you are left with all cone and no gelato. The cone was average but I did like the mango flavour of gelato that I ordered (we ordered 2 flavours each and I think I had pistachio and mango the first time, the pistachio flavour was only average. Mum had hazelnut and coffee, Mum always chose coffee).
The original plan was to take it easy the first day and do mostly Vatican City (since I picked a hotel in the Prati neighbourhood). So we did St Peter’s square and then we already lost the way trying to find Castello Sant’Angelo and gave up and returned to the accommodation. I also had the intention of returning in the afternoon for St Peter’s Cathedral in the afternoon to avoid the queue (that was in fact written down in my detailed travel itinerary G doc but being too tired Mum and I gave it a miss).
For dinner, we had it at a fastfood place called HFC that was combination KFC and pizzeria. Out of curiosity, I ordered the wurstel and french fries pizza. Well, you couldn’t really taste the french fries but other than that, it was an okay pizza, different from the ones we have in Australia. It was extra cheesy and seemed to taste good in small amount. But the cheesiness got to us after a while.
Day 2 in Rome, we started with catching the metro from Ottaviano to Barberini. And because we slept in, we were already in with the crowd at Trevi Fountain at 10amish. Unlike the Vatican City/Prati region, we managed to hit all the main tourist attractions in Rome despite losing our way often and having to ask for directions. We had a bland tasting seafood aka calamari salad for lunch at Piazza Navona. Later, we had a time mix up and thought we were late for our dinner appointment near the Colosseum at 6:30pm when it was only 3:13pm in Rome. That meant we sat around for a long stretch of time near the eating strip nearby- we had gelato, soft drink etc. The dinner we had was at Trattoria Luzzi. Mum had the carbonara while I had a baked sea bass/bream. Mum didn’t particularly like the carbonara- it was tasteless without the bacon inside and too salty with. My fish was okay but not spectacular. After dinner, we went to the Colosseum to take pictures and only Mum had a picture of the full Colosseum, I only had a pic of me with a corner of the Colosseum which was not identifiable as the Colosseum. But ah well, not that I’m an enthusiast of having pics of myself with all the landmarks.
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