Stops and starts

Well Siena was definitely our laziest stay yet. I think it was because it was so hot, and the house was so nice, that we didn’t feel bad not doing much. Also our new neighbors yesterday included a young violinist and his mom, and the guy has been practicing classical music – and well! – in the afternoons so we feel classy doing nothing. It didn’t help that neither one of us was feeling particularly awesome stomach-wise – might have been the water we had at a fountain, or too much heavy food. So lots of reading and such. We thought the trains to Rome ran every hour or so, so we weren’t really in a hurry, but it turns out we had forgotten that we had to switch trains – there’s nothing direct from Siena. So we got a local train to Florence again, which was tiny outside but nice inside at least. Then we had some waiting time in the train station, or thought we did until we noticed that reservations were compulsory on all trains to Rome. We got through the line with our ticket with 4 minutes to spare and jumped on the train. Whew! The consequence of all that was a lot of sweatiness for the next two hours on the train, sadly, but at least we made it to Rome (a few hours later than we expected).

Finding our hotel involved a similar level of adventure. Peter hadn’t written anything out, so we got on the right street only to reach a dead end. We turned around and must have looked really confused, because some guy carrying two beer bottles asked if we were looking for Hostel Ivanhoe. We thought we had booked a hotel, but the Ivanhoe part was right, so we followed him into a building and up to a floor with low weird lighting and pumping music from the reception desk. The guy there had to turn it down three times before he could hear us, and then told us that we had made a mistake – there *was* a Hotel Ivanhoe, and it was right across the street. Ooops. Well at least it made us glad we weren’t staying at the hostel. Turns out we had missed the hotel because it was buried under some scaffolding, although the front desk assures us that the construction is over. We will probably not get any natural lighting in the room, though, because of it…so I guess we are doing a lot of sightseeing to avoid feeling depressed by dark fluorescent lights. I think it seems shady but Peter assures me that everything in Rome is kind of this way. Good to know?

The room itself is ok, I guess. They did the push-together-two-twins trick again (we’ve seen that before) to make a double, and the shower stall is small enough to be a veritable challenge, but it’s supposedly very conveniently located. We tried to go and see the Coliseum at night because it was close, but we got lost and just ended up looping back and stopping at a restaurant to eat. Nothing special, just some pasta dishes, but enough. It did remind us that European bacon is sadness – the idea of crunchy has sadly not come over the ocean yet. Ah well. Tomorrow we have the Vatican tour so it should be a pretty serious day! We’ll see how the internet updating works as there is only signal in the lobby, which is four flights down…but now at least you know we made it.