When in Rome…

They say that all roads lead to Rome, but I learned that in fact that they do not. A group of us took a train from Como to Milan and had the opportunity to practice our Italian while trying to navigate our way through the Milan train station. According to the map we thought we could take the subway as a short cut in order to get to “main train station.” To our surprise it was not a short cut, and was not the main train station that we ended up at… after back-tracking and making our way back to where we started, we found our correct train that would take us to Rome.

We rode on a high speed train from Milan to Rome and got to see much of the country side along the way. After 5 hours of sitting across from a guy who was taking up all of my leg room and stinking up our section of the train, I was ready to get off the train and explore Rome. We reached the city in the evening and had a difficult time finding our hotel in the dark.

Even though we were excited to get to our hotel safely, we were not very excited about our accommodations. For the next two weeks I will be staying with three other guys in one small hotel room. There are four twin beds pushed together in a room built for one bed… I am beginning to feel like a sardine! It will be interesting to see if the four of us survive these tight conditions for the next two weeks. I will keep you updated.

On a side note…

The quickest way to learn Italian is when ordering food at an Italian restaurant. Every meal is an opportunity to try something new and learn a few more vocabulary words. For example, “gamberetto” means shrimp, but don’t ask me what I had to eat in order to learn that lesson…