Tu parla inglese?

Honestly, in my wildest dreams I never could have envisioned what the past year has had in store for me… in my personal life… career and most of all to the places I would travel. I have always wanted to travel and had always focused my itinerary more domestically… for many reasons… there are so many amazing, historical and beautiful places to see in the US and well, the thought of going to a foreign country made my anxiety level peak into dangerous levels.

So when my husband started hinting around at our week long trip scheduled between Christmas and New Year’s I was excited but nervous. I was glad he had taken the planning reigns and I just got to go along but for about two months I didn’t have a clue where we were going… then told me… ROME and BARCELONA! Of all the places I had speculated us going it hadn’t even crossed my mind that we’d be going to Europe… partly because my husband told me we were going somewhere warm! I tried to keep my anxiety in check but the fact neither of us spoke Italian and my Spanish (even after 5 years is at Sesame Street level) was nerve wracking!

The long plane ride over (leaving out of Orlando, a layover in the really nice airport in Amsterdam, flying into Leonardo da Vinci-Fiumicino airport in Rome) was much better than I anticipated. We flew out at 8pm and were able to sleep the most of the way… the lights in the cabin were mainly turned off and everyone slept. After getting off the plane and navigating our way through the baggage claim there is a fairly organized taxi system to get you into a cab and into Rome… if I remember correctly it was about a$50 ride and took about 30-45 minutes. We stayed at the Hotel Milton which is just SW of the Coliseum and is only about a 10 minute walk to the Coliseum… after we checked in we went out to explore and stumbled right onto the Coliseum… you have to see it at night at we did it’s amazing! The room at the Hotel Milton was a good size, clean, had Internet, had air conditioning, the concierge spoke English- extremely helpful in a hotel for the million questions we had!!, and a fantastic continental breakfast was included! The first night we walked around until we found a place with that was a big, heated, tent outside the main restaurant and ate real, Italian pizza and wine… followed by finding the closest Gelato! The restaurant we made a point to go to was La Rosetta (their site is in Italian but here is a review) an amazing place specializing in seafood. Everywhere else we stumbled into and everything was great! With a good map you can pretty much find all the landmarks you’ll want to go find… the Pantheon (which is really close to La Rosetta), Coliseum- pay to go in and get the audio tour!!, Piazza Navona, Arch of Constantine, pretty much everything. The things that were a little further out that you might want to taxi to are the Vatican City and the Borghese Gallery. They are coincidentally the two things we wanted to tour but didn’t have time. The line for the Vatican tour was extremely long so you should go first thing in the morning or get tickets before and the Borghese Gallery was sold out for something like the next 8 days so I’d get tickets before you leave. We did get to see the Vittoriano Museum but not go inside and tour the Van Gogh exhibit like we wanted. We had paid for one of those sightseeing tour buses and once we found the stop they included headphones and would give you historical information but the stops were really hard to find and I think we only used it once so I really wouldn’t bother. Overall, the language barrier wasn’t really a big problem. The majority of the people spoke English and many of the restaurants had English menus or translations on the menu. We were there when the temperature was about high 50’s-60’s during the day but it dropped dramatically at night to the mid 40’s. We had heard about a lot of homeless people but we didn’t see a lot in the city maybe because the temperatures were so low. Also it wasn’t as crowded with tourists as we had heard also probably because of the temperature.  We’d heard the taxi’s were expensive but didn’t find that to be a problem at all… do not do pre-booked transportation via travel sites like Orbitz they have a lot of rules. Do tell the taxi driver where you are going and ask how much it will be!! No taxi should over $50, even from the airport!

I think we hit the high points of Rome in the short time we had but still left a few things to do for when we go back… spend a day or two in Rome then head to some outer cities like Florence!