We had talked for a bit about making a trek to Cinque Terre on this day. It’s a set of 5 beautiful coastal towns in the Italian Riviera. The problem is that it’s a 4 hour train ride to get there, and we’d have to get back that night to catch our flight the next day. Since we’d had enough of having to get up early with our tour, we just decided to do very little.
I wanted to see the Circo Massimo – the ancient grounds where the Romans held chariot races, etc, so I hopped the subway down there while Becky chilled in the hotel room and worked on her book. The Circo Massimo is really just a barren field at this point. They are doing some excavating on the east end, but the rest is open, so I just walked around it and through it and there was really no one else there looking at it.
Since I barely spent any time there I decided to head up to the Piazza de Popolo since it looked like something I should do. They have a huge arch and a church there. The things I thought interesting were the fact that there were two identical church separated by roads which led away from the plaza. It’s also the entrance to the Borghese park and featured a fountain under an obelisk.
Since we were missing non-Italian food, we decided to head to the Hard Rock Cafe for lunch. That was cool – I always like going to them anyway and I’ve dragged Becky to quite a few of them all over the world. We saw they had Pepsi there, so Becky got all excited that they might have Mountain Dew, but she was disappointed. It was very hot out, and all days here are very humid, so we decided to head back to the hotel to get out of the heat. As Becky read her book, I tried to learn everything I could about European soccer in an hour (with the help of my friends at Wikipedia). I was wearing my David Villa shirt and people were asking me questions about how much I liked him or if I was Spanish. I figured I should probably know what the heck they were talking about.
Next we headed back to the Vatican to check out the Pope’s Tombs which sit underneath the Basilica. We had a mishap with the bus transfer and ended up walking around the Piazza Venezia for about 10 minutes trying to find the mysterious bus 62. We actually ended up finding that bus on our way back, which didn’t make us very happy. We went through the tomb of the popes (the line was much shorter to get into the Basilica this time) and saw the tomb of Pope John Paul II as well as 90 other popes. We decided not to wait in the long line to go to the Cupola or the top of the basilica, so we just headed back via the Colosseum.
We ventured out again for dinner – this time to a place called Trinity College – an Irish Pub near the Pantheon. It was listed in our book about Rome and the website held some pretty good promise. We were disappointed since there was no one there and the service was poor. When we got there we looked at the menu and placed our orders – although Becky’s choice wasn’t available, so she had to settle for a hamburger. About 3 minutes later, the waitress and a guy came out and replaced all the menus on the tables – with ones had a lot more choices that Becky would’ve preferred and higher prices. I started to wonder what the penalty was for stiffing the restaurant as I figured they’d charge the higher prices from the new menu after we ordered. They didn’t for the entrees – just the drinks were each 1 Euro more than expected.
We headed back towards our hotel and stopped at Termini to pick up tickets for our train ride to the airport. On the way out we saw a McDonalds, and since we hadn’t eaten there yet, we figured we’d stop by for a Coke. At this point we were missing the comforts of America, so anything we could find that reminded us of it, we were ready for.
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