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ROME

zofiakonieczna
Apr 2, 2015
3 min read

Having only a few days off university for the Easter holidays, we decided not to waste the opportunity to travel around Italy and started planning our trip straight away. Having previously travelled to Venice by train, our initial plan was to travel to Rome for two days, then move onto Florence and, if we had some extra time, end our trip in Genoa.

However, as we previously found out, nothing ever really goes according to plan here and so we found ourselves trying to arrange a lift, using somewhat questionable translations provided by Google, through a BlaBlaCar app two days before the trip. Luckily we found a trustworthy Italian who was willing to take three unorganised, loud and slightly annoying girls all the way to Rome.

After a slightly awkward and extremely long 5 and a half hour journey, we reached our destination of Rome, however to our surprise, the very quiet driver (who didn’t feel the need to eat or drink anything for the entire duration of the journey) dropped us off at the Rome Airport located around an hour away from our hostel.

After an additional €30 ride in a taxi which we shared with a lovely German family, we finally arrived at the hostel called Camping Village Roma, which Alannah found on hostelworld.com for a mere €8 a night. We should have suspected it was too good of a deal as we quickly learned that we were actually going to sleep in a tent for two nights alongside a group of kids that evidently came to Rome on a school trip.

Feeling slightly let down by the trip so far, we decided to get ready and ventured out into the city of Rome looking for a good bar to let our hair down and forget about the misfortunes we experienced in the day. Unfortunately this didn’t go according to plan either as we found ourselves getting lost on the metro and unable to locate any good bars or clubs.

Our second day in Rome proved to be more enjoyable, even though I had to wear pretty much every single item of clothing I brought for the weekend to bed as it was freezing cold. It also rained a lot. We managed to visit the Colosseum - however we were slightly disappointed as the famous landmark had scaffolding around it which made a lesser impact - the Vatican, Roman Forum, Altar of the Fatherland and The Basilica of St. Mary of the Altar of Heaven. We didn’t get the chance to go inside the Vatican Museum as we turned up too late or get to see the Pope which was quite disappointing.

Fortunately we did join a pub crawl which turned out to be surprisingly cheap - €20 for a free bar was a nice change of scenery - and incredibly fun as we met people from all around the world and got to visit some of the most popular bars in Rome. However our night wouldn’t be complete without some type of drama and unluckily Alannah noticed her phone was missing, which resulted in her looking around for it for the majority of the night.

After waking up late and missing our next BlaBlaCar which should’ve taken us to the next destination, we felt defeated as everything that could have gone wrong probably did, as the phone with all our information was lost forever. We spent Easter Sunday hungover, cold and wet trying to find an open police station to file a report. We did cheer up after a quick trip to McDonalds and decided to continue with our travels by buying a peculiarly cheap train ticket to Florence.