Rome Wasn’t Built In A Day…But It Was Conquered In Two (Day 1)

To view my Photo Stream from the entire trip click here!

The weeks leading up to this trip have been a little ridiculous to say the least. I’ve been traveling and organizing events for work like a crazy person. I’ve been exhausted. So when the night before the trip finally arrived, I was strangely not as excited as I wanted to be. I think I was just coming down from all of the craziness. Don’t get me wrong. This is my first time out of the country since birth (crazy, right!?) so I was definitely excited. I went to bed around 2:30-3am and got up at 7:30am because I wanted to be tired enough to go to sleep on the first leg of our flight (10hrs from JFK to Istanbul) My amazing girlfriend, Kim, got up super early on that Saturday morning to bring James and I bagels from Brooklyn Bagel in Astoria. I was pretty impressed and very grateful for her to say the least. We did some last minute packing and walked out the door around 9:20am. We took the metro to the airport because we didn’t feel like splitting a $52 cab fair. It only took us about an hour to get to the airport anyway.

We got our boarding passes at the Turkish Airlines booth and then realized we had about an hour to kill before we even needed to be close to our gate. So we walked up stairs and spotted a SBarro!

No, we didn’t eat there but we did find it amusing that it claimed to have fresh Italian pizza seeing as we were headed to Italy. Security wasn’t nearly as bad as I would have imagined. It took us maybe 10 minutes to get through the line and it was no different than domestic travel. Once we found our gate, we went to the bar that was conveniently 30 yards away from it and got something to relax us for the flight. James talked to his girlfriend, Emily; and Kim and I texted for a bit and then it was time to board the plane. We even got a swag bag! The ride wasn’t too bad. Watched a couple movies, ate dinner and breakfast, and slept a little.

Upon arriving in Istanbul, we had a couple hours to kill so we wandered the massive duty free stores. James bought a couple things. I was hoping to find a Starbucks that sold the city mugs that I have begun collecting but alas the one we found didn’t have them. We had to take a bus to our plane which was a little smaller (about the size of a 737). It only took about 2.5 hours to fly from Istanbul to Rome.

We didn’t check any luggage so we went straight for the train station. Little did we know, that would prove to be more expensive than we thought so we decided to find a bus from the airport. We got a round trip bus ticket (for the trip back to the airport at end of our trip) for €8 as opposed to a €14 one way. Finding the bus station was quite an elaborate but boring journey. The bus ride was only about half an hour and from there we easily found the Metro and made our way to our bed and breakfast. Before we left Termini, we stopped by a TIM (a big mobile phone provider in Europe) store and picked up a SIM card and a pay as you go plan for an iPhone. The owner, Roberta, was a really nice woman who let us in and gave us some advice on where to go after we got settled in. We went to a really large church first in the area and walked around exploring how beautiful it was. Then we hit up the coliseum. Yes, the Roman Coliseum! It was massive to say the least. A really amazing site. We paid €12 for a two day pass that include entrance into the Roman Forum as well as another site that I can’t recall.

We had walked so much that we decided to go back to our home after and rest for a while before dinner. We made a reservation at Gusto, a really good Italian restaurant near the river. After dinner, we roamed the dark streets. It’s another world at night. Everything has a yellowish hue to it because of the lighting. It’s pretty cool. One of James’s friends had told us about a McDonalds near the Spanish Steps so we decided to check it out. It was HUGE. Like no McDonalds i had ever seen before. It was super nice. A couple times i forgot i was actually even in one. We didnt eat there but we got some coffee. I decided to FaceTime Kim since we had wifi. We talked for a little while and then James and I headed out. We wandered for a few hours, saw the Trevi Fountain, and then walked home. We probably walked a good 5-8 miles that day. We were definitely exhausted when we got home. I will say the Trevi and the Coliseum definitely lived up to their hype. When we got home, we ate a snack, uploaded some images to our iPads and then went to bed excited for the next day.

Blogging is exhausting so day 2 may be later tonight or tomorrow. Hopefully I won’t get too behind. I will probably write less next time though. You can ask me for details later.