The Nebraska "Skyline" Project: Spain/Italy Trip (Part 7)

In this post, I'll talk about the first day we toured in Rome. We crammed a lot of stuff into one day, so I may not go into tremendous detail about the actual attractions themselves since most of them are world famous and a lot of information about them is already known.

I'll pick up where I left off from the last post. We left port in a bus and headed into Rome, which was about an hour away. At that point, we were all dying slightly because we hadn't had anything to eat since we had crappy ferry lunch food. I think we finally got to the restaurant to eat around 10 p.m. We had salad, real Italian lasagna, some kind of ice cream (I don't know if it qualified as gelato). I don't know if it was a good restaurant or if I was just starving, but it was the best food I had had in days...

We finally got back to our hotel to check in around 11 p.m. and had to get to bed quickly to prepare for the horrifyingly early morning ahead of us. What sucks about all of the hotels I stayed in in Europe is that air conditioning is never at the quality one would hope... Maybe I'm over-generalizing, but most people I know like it to be cold in a room when they go to sleep, and most people can't sleep when it's too warm. Well, it was ALWAYS too warm in Europe. In every hotel I slept in shorts and a tshirt with either the thinnest sheet blanket or no blanket. Even when the AC was on maximum at these hotels, it felt like it never got lower than 75 or 80 in the rooms. What killed me was that the housekeeper at our Italian hotel would open the windows while we were touring and we'd all come back to lovely, baking hot rooms. Even if you instantly shut the windows and turned the AC on blast, it never cooled down enough for me to be comfortable.

Speaking of the heat, Italy is blazing hot in comparison to Spain. In Spain it was almost chilly at times and wearing jeans was not a problem. In Italy, I was sweating profusely at 9 a.m. and my legs were stuck to my jeans. One thing that ruined Italy for me slightly was the weather. It was sunny, but miserably hot. I regretted not bringing shorts for those few days very much...

The first day, we went to the Colosseum, the Roman Forum, St. Paul's Basilica, and then our tour guide pointed at various other things as we drove along. We also got to see the place where Julius Caesar died, which is mind-blowing the longer you think about it. The architecture in Rome is "similar but different" as compared to the architecture in Spain. It's hard to explain exactly what's different, it just is... The Colosseum and Roman Forum were also amazing when you think about how incredibly old all of the structures are. There's nothing in the U.S. that old, so it's amazing when people talk about a building being build in the "B.C." era.

One place that I can only claim to have seen briefly was The Catacombs, which is a huge system of underground tombs. We met up with our tour guide and went towards one of the entrances. He sat outside and talked about some diagrams and history for what felt like an eternity. It was stiflingly hot with all of us standing under this canopy in close quarters, 90-degree heat, and zero wind. I started feeling very lightheaded, so I went and sat on the side. I thought I would feel better going underground where it was cool, but I was wrong. We stopped at the first area where our tour guide began to talk again, and I could sense a faint coming on. I tried to tell my boyfriend that and tried to bend over to get the blood flow back to my head, but he insisted that I should stand up. Bless his heart, but I'm not sure he understands the fainting sensation very well. He kept propping me up, which is about the worst thing he could have done. If I could have stepped out into the "hall" and just bent over, I think I would have been okay and able to go on because generally I can completely avoid fainting if I can get blood flow to my head immediately. However, he redeemed himself by basically dragging me out of the tomb and fighting off the other tour guides to get me to an exit. I don't think I ever fully fainted because I remember everything that happened and I never completely went limb. I was on my feet, but I couldn't see anything (my vision was totally blacked out). He found a staircase and we sat down. Somehow, in a 50-degree cave, I was sweating...

We left out of that peaceful little exit that no one was guarding and found our way to the gift shop area. I still felt off, but I didn't feel like danger was imminent anymore. My boyfriend stated that my face was no longer paper white, which was a good sign. At the next stop (St. Paul's Basilica), I got a water bottle and some ice cream to cover the possibility of low blood sugar and dehydration at once. I don't really know what caused the problem, but I guess I now have a story to tell my children some day...

To take a step backward for a moment, I do want to discuss the difference I noticed between Italian and Spanish tour guides. Any time we had a guide for a specific attraction in Spain, the guide was always very concise and speedy. In Toledo, we practically had to jog to keep up with our guide. In Italy, however, the guides were remarkably long-winded. They would stand at one object and give a 10-minute explanation of each thing. It would have been better if they had hit the main points and moved along... If I had to choose, I would choose a Spanish tour guide any day of the week.

Anyway, upon arriving back at our hotel, I'm pretty sure the first thing every person did was shower. I was disgusting by the end of the day from the insane amount of sweating. I then got to hop in bed and continue sweating since the A/C barely seemed to work... I know I'm coming off whiny, but I really mean this as a positive in that going to Europe made me appreciate a lot of the things I consider a "basic amenity" at home that are obviously not available in many place around the world.

Finally, here are some of the more interesting pics from the day.