So, Rome. It's sort of like what I imagine Disney's interpretation of an Italian city would look like, and it's full of punks, couples making out on every free surface, and cute old couples wandering down the street.

Erin and I took the train in yesterday and arrived around 1. Kind of a crazy weekend. We set off to find our hostel and drop our bags, and we ended up walking through this really ghetto part of Rome - no sight of the hostel. We asked for directions and turns out that hostelworld.com's description of "centrally located" actually meant "centrally located in the middle of BFE." Since we didn't want to spend our whole day walking through depressing parts of Rome, we ditched the hostel and hopped on a bus/tram/trolley thing back to the center of the city, which promptly shut down because someone had parked their car across the track. So. Still in BFE, we followed the tracks for awhile and eventually hopped on a random bus that took us basically even further out of the city. Oops.

Few hours later we ended up near(ish) the Colosseum, so we grabbed lunch and started exploring, and basically walked around for many, many, many hours. Everything is so pretty at dusk/night. We found a random (sort of expensive) hotel near the Spanish steps, then hit some touristy spots - the Pantheon, Trevi Fountain, gardens that I can't remember the name of (way up high, awesome view of the city), more ruins, and saw Vatican City from a distance. We found a cute place for dinner, followed by gelato from a crazy, crazy gelato place that stuck toys and tiny cones and sparkley things in their cones, then crashed back at the hotel in a really huge, warm, comfy bed.

Today, more walking. Left the hotel pretty early, went to St. Peter's Basillica in the Vatican. Heard the Pope speak! Cool! He addressed the huge, huge crowd in like 5 different languages, it was actually very emotional... okay. Afterwards, we wandered along the river, saw the Colosseum, the Forum, etc., all in the cold rain, then hopped on a train home.

So. I like traveling by train, a lot. Also, our hotel had free breakfast with really good chocolate pastries and little individual servings of Nutella (I stole a few). All good things. And now I have to sleep. And I'll do pictures later.