Not Possible! So next on the trip, the little Ninja goes to Rome! Home of Whose Lane is it Anyway? Where the every traffic lane is made up and the lines on the road don’t matter!
Travel/Rome 1
- The plane ride was uneventful, but my allergies were making my ears difficult to pop so that wasn’t fun.
- At the airport, the people that drove our shuttle to the hostel addressed us as the Spice Girls. I could already tell the major personality shift from Paris to Rome, and I hadn’t even been there for more than a few hours at that point. We shared this shuttle with an Italian couple and their something-month old baby who were also on the plane with us. They actually were/are? living in the US for a while so it was nice to talk to them and play peekaboo with the baby.
- It was also surprisingly nice to be in a car on a road, like my stress level went down considerably. I think that car ride might have been the most comfortable I’d been the whole trip up to that point. It’s sad when I was so excited to see gas stations around. Though the reason there were gas stations around was because the metro isn’t as good/used much in Rome.
Rome 2
- We slept in until 9:30 because we finally went to bed some time after 1am last night. However, when we did get up, I still had to put on shoes like I take off bandaids—gritted my teeth and went! My feet felt comparatively better, but I was worried that they might never get use to the strain because I wasn’t giving them enough time to rest.
- Another city, another group of peddlers so you know what that means?
Street Peddlers: Rome Mods
Daytime Items: selfie sticks, purses (also sunglasses, art)
Rainy Day Items: umbrellas
Nighttime Items: laser pointers, other toys that light up in the dark
Domain: tourist places
Persistance Level: 5
- These peddlers are a little more insistent, but the Italian cops are a little more involved with trying to stop them by patrolling often.
Inside St. Paul’s Cathedral.
- We went to the Vatican first thing. We got a tour with four other groups of people. It was interesting. There are lots of museums and etc. around it too. Saw some Swiss Guards. You know the drill.
Water fountain.
- Coolest fact about Rome is that there are water fountains. Literally fountains that you are supposed to drink out of. And the water tastes really good! Such a relief to not have to pay for water after having to pay through the nose in France. The tour guide lady said that water is clean in Rome because they still use the aqueducts and it filters the water naturally. Not all of the fountains are naturally cold but the one we went to was and it was awesome.
Aqueduct.
- We got lunch near the Vatican and got to watch some of the purse peddlers run off every ten minutes or so when a small, red police car with a blue light would come around the corner. And, call me a writer, but I’m like 80% sure that the guy sitting at a table next to us while we were eating was an undercover cop. He would talk on his phone every once in a while and occasionally walk inside the restaurant to talk. In between, he would just glare at the peddlers. So exciting!
- We also got gelato for the first time here. Half chocolate, half vanilla for 3€!
- We walked around and chilled near the river as we listened to a guy play guitar for a little while. I took a video of it for Dad because it was totally stuff he would jam to. This day is just much more chill than any of the days we were in Paris. I like it much better.
- The Roma traffic was so…interesting that I thought of several ways to describe it over my time there. What do you think of these?
- The traffic lines on the ground are more what you would call guidelines rather than actual rules.
- The lines on the roads are so worn and that accurately represents how much people care about them.
- Welcome to Italy where every lane is made up and the lines don’t matter. Whose lane is it anyway?
- There were a ton of police around because they were gearing up for the pope to speak. We actually saw them do stuff to like checking a street performer, a man who had a kiddie pool full of soap and various bubble wands, for his license. The guy had his license which is good because the bubble wand performers were my favorite kind of street performers. They never asked for money though you could buy bubble wands from them. They let kids come up and make bubbles and it was so fun to watch. Anyway, I’m not sure how corrupt the police here is but it seems like they aren’t. I feel relatively safe.
- I actually kind of liked the enthusiastic waiters because if they couldn’t get you what you want, they would help you find it. Though it looks like they stand outside restaurants like bouncers, it’s actually easier when they come to you because they explain everything to you and seat you so there’s no awkwardness about whether they’re too busy or don’t speak English or something.
- I wasn’t sure if they would speak English more in Rome because most people can’t speak Italian or if they would speak it less, but all I can say for sure (and it applied to all of Italy looking back on it) was that they are much less enthusiastic about speaking English and we’ve come across more people who couldn’t speak English at all compared to France.
- Our hostel was near Termini Station which is half train station, half mall and was super convenient. It had a sort of mini grocery store inside it as well as an ATM, and it was much easier to each cheap and buy the essential there than in Paris.
15,000+ steps, 6+ miles, 7 floors
Rome 3
- My feet finally didn’t feel like I was stepping on needles when I put my feet on the floor first thing in the morning. So that was nice.
- The street signs in Rome are actually on the traffic lights like in the US, not on the buildings like they are in England and France. The pedestrian crossings also do yellow lights unlike anywhere else in Europe I’ve seen.
- We went to the Colosseum, but I FORGOT MY NINJA. It was a sad day for me.
Leaving my ninja at the hostel meant I had to be in a picture myself. Ugh.
- We ate more pasta at lunch in view of the Colosseum, and a guy serenaded us with his own version of “Yesterday” on the guitar as we ate. You can pretty much gauge how expensive a place is going to be by the price of their pomodoro spaghetti. Anything above 8 euros is too much.
View from the gardens.
- We then went to the forum and Palatine gardens. It’s very beautiful, and it also helped that the day was gorgeous too. I was walking around in a T-shirt soaking up whatever inch of sun I could for the first time since winter started. Despite that though, everyone got kicked out of the gardens at 3pm because the whole area needed to go on lock down mode because the Pope was doing the Stations at the Cross for Good Friday in the Colosseum that night.
- We got gelato again. Always two flavored, always wonderful. This time I got creme (vanilla) and dark chocolate. Overall, the food portions are so much more generous there than it was in Paris. And it was easier to eat cheap there. There was no downside. While we were scrounging for baguettes in France, I finally felt like I was on vacation there.
- I loved the weather there. Have I said that already? It was cold in the shade and hot in the sun—just the way it should be. And there were those drinking fountains everywhere. Rome was just better than Paris at every opportunity.
- After wandering around and getting dinner, we went to see the pope. It was a long wait to which we kept asking each other if it was “pope time” yet. Thus, “pope time” became a running joke throughout the whole trip. Anyway, when “pope time” did arrive, we saw him do Stations at the Cross near a lit up Colosseum. I saw him, like, with my own two eyeballs! Though we couldn’t get the full experience because it was all in Italian/Latin, we could still follow though. I couldn’t see much but I could look through some people’s iPhones as they recorded it. So that was a once in a lifetime thing.
28,000+ steps, 12+ miles, 22 floors
Rome 4
- Next, (I made sure I had my ninja) we went to see the Spanish Steps and Trevi Fountain—effectively crossing those off my bucket list. The fountain, however, was under construction so we were able to use a walkway to get closer to the fountain than normal but we were’t allowed to throw coins. It’s okay because there was no water anyway.
Trevi Fountain.
- During lunch had bruschetta for the first time. It’s good to eat if you ever feel like eating a whole tomato on a piece of toast. As part of a meal deal, I also had a weird dessert that looked like tofu but was sort of like a really solid vanilla-ish flavored jello. It was interesting, but not something I think I’d ever want again. Not when there’s gelato literally everywhere.
- We next went in the Pantheon. It’s smaller than I expected. Then we went to the Campo Di Fiori (the biggest outdoor market in the world?) and looked around. I got my brother an Assassin’s Creed T-shirt there and got my mom a bracelet nearby.
- We also got called the Spice Girls once again. We were very confused at first because none of us were die hard fans or anything. We just wondered if it was because there were five of us girls—that is until we quickly googled a picture of them. For those who don’t know, the Spice Girls were made up of a girl who’s blonde (Baby Spice), a girl who’s a redhead (Ginger Spice), a girl who’s black (Scary Spice), and two girls who are brunettes (Posh Spice and Sporty Spice). And guess what our group was? A girl who is blonde (Mackenzie), a girl who is a redhead (Corrie), a girl who is black (Charnell), and two girls who are brunettes (Sydney and I). It made a lot more sense after that. And let’s just say that we’re not afraid of telling people what we want—what we really, really want—anymore.
- That night we ate dinner at the Termini and we went to a cheap Japanese food place just to spice things up. We wanted to eat some differently flavored noodles, I guess. They also served mochi which I gleefully shoved out a few euros for. We also got McFlurries, and I got ones with Smarties in them—the non-American Smarties. These Smarties are chocolate and basically MnM’s. It was delicious.
22+ steps, 9+ miles, 7 floors
Rome 5/Easter
- It turns out you can effectively do Rome in four days without feeling rushed. We were kinda searching for things to do this day. It was made even more difficult because it was Easter so many things were closed that day. So we went and saw random things that looked interesting on the map we got a the hostel.
- My feet stopped hurting by this day. I’m not sure if it’s because we ran out of places to see and we were walking less or if my feet just finally got used to the abuse.
- Something else I observed was that I wasn’t picking up the language here like I was in France. I never really felt comfortable with trying to speak any either.
19,000+ steps, 8+ miles, 6 floors
The Brave, Little Ninja 
Loved this!
So a bracelet huh?
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