Countryside Italy

Posted on Tuesday, April 11th 2017, 0:09 by Alexandra

Today was such a beautiful and fun day! It didn’t feel like we did too much walking, but my phone tells me this was my best day yet, 22,800 (accumulating: 121,800 steps in 6 days). We had to leave the apartment at 9am but we couldn’t check in at the hotel until noon, so we took the car, drove south to a lake we had seen on Google Maps. That was a good choice. The lake was called Lago Albano and it looked like a volcano crater, which is also is, I just double checked. The city was the cutest ever! It was placed on the hillside with an amazing view over the lake. There was only 8,800 inhabitants. Super cute town. After we checked it out for a bit, we drove down in the crater to walk a bit on the beach. The beach was black, which made sense since it was a volcanic crater. Such a pretty place. Here is a link to a sphere photo which I uploaded to Google Maps.

We then just kept on driving and found ourselves in another small village called Rocca di Papa. It was also on a hillside but more spread out. We saw one old man walking on the tangled road beneath us (when we were standing on the highest point we could find for a great view) with 6 big bottles of water, waddling along to his house further down.

We then drove back to Rome and to our hotel for the night, Pulitzer Roma. It is not much on the outside, but it is cute on the inside, and they have a dog mascot, a black and white cocker spaniel. Adorable! The lady in charge (I think) is super nice. We had lunch at the hotel and then decided to go into Rome today instead of Ostia since we got a parking space right outside the hotel door! It literally couldn’t have been better. So tomorrow we are going to Ostia instead after checking out and then going straight to the airport from there since it is very close. In Rome we walked around a bit to see the big things one last time. We saw Colosseum twice, Pantheon, Fontana di Trevi, had dinner at Piazza del Popolo and I bought a new backpack, a wine red Herschel. Really cool one. An early birthday present to myself!

Vatican City

Posted on Thursday, April 6th 2017, 23:02 by Alexandra

Last night we had a little bit of a freakout, we hadn’t booked any tours before coming here, so we looked into it last night. Our plan was to go to the Vatican today, Colosseum on Friday, and Pompeii on either Saturday or Sunday. We have one of those three things figured out. We booked a tour to both Vatican City and Colosseum, but today we found out the Colosseum tour was already full so we had to book it for another day. I think we knew that it would be full-booked, but we still didn’t book anything in advance. So I encourage you all planning to go to Rome, book everything in advance, at least Colosseum! We have rebooked the Colosseum tour for Saturday morning, I just hope that one is not full as well. Otherwise the only option I know of is early on Tuesday morning, on the day we are leaving. Let’s cross our fingers for Saturday!

Anyway, we booked through the official website of the Vatican Museums and picked a tour of the museums, the Sistine Chapel, and the St. Peter’s Basilica. It was interesting, the tour guide had been in the Vatican for 50 years or something, as a guard and something else. Pretty cool. He knew a lot. What was not so fun about it was that we were not alone. There were approximately 1,340,292 other people there. It was hard to see anything, you could hardly see the floor you were walking on! Too many people. I also wish we could have stayed a little bit longer in the Sistine Chapel to watch the paintings a little bit longer. So many details everywhere! St. Peter’s Basilica was really cool! Church architecture is, but I am kinda bummed that I don’t remember too much from the World Architecture class I took at Cal Poly 2.5 years ago. Probably a third of that course was about ancient Rome. I feel kinda lost here in general and don’t know much about the pretty old buildings I take lots of pictures on. And honestly, I am too tired to try and do any research on it now afterwards. It is still pretty, and as a fan of architecture, I really enjoy this city.

After the Vatican we were already tired (it was around 12:30pm). We found a cute restaurant called Polese and had pizza there. I had a proscuitto pizza and it was incredible! The crust was the thinnest I have ever seen!

We then walked along to Pantheon which was incredible. I remember the professor talking a lot about it and it felt really cool to be there and see it with my own eyes. But like I said before, I don’t really remember exactly what it was. I think something about it withstanding WWII, but still being damaged from it?

Our next stop was Fontana di Trevi. We found the people before the fountain. Crazy many people there! But the fountain was so pretty! If there weren’t that many people there, I would have loved to sit there with a gelato in the sun, just watching the water.

We walked 19,000 steps today (accumulating to 39,000 in two days) so we took many breaks, right after the fountain we sat down for a Swedish fika with ice cream, coffee, and something sweet.

The last thing we did for the day was trying to find the GAP store so I could buy a new pair of favorite jeans. I bought a pair of True Skinny jeans in San Francisco some years ago but they have been worn so much that I feel that it is time to get a new pair. 600 SEK for a pair of awesome jeans was so cheap! I also bought a pair of more fancy pants for 300 for future situations when my normal style of clothes does not fit the occasion. I wish we had GAP in Sweden.

Then we just walked around, found a square (Piazza del Popolo), saw a staircase up to a house where it looked like a great view (Piazza Napoleone I). We will go back there tomorrow when it is dark to get some real nice photographs. My soles didn’t hurt today, but my calves when we got back, and the top of my feet has been hurting since this afternoon. So much walking! We have decided to take it a bit slow tomorrow, sleep until 10am, plan our day with museums and such, Hard Rock Café in the evening and some photographing in the evening.

Here, enjoy a bunch of pictures from today (only mine, not Jesper’s, I might post some of them when we get back home).

Hard Rock Cafe #16

Posted on Tuesday, September 15th 2015, 0:38 by Alexandra

This post used to contain pictures, but due to new storage limitations from WordPress, I had to fix the problem and decided to create a new blog that works as an archive for all the posts from my travels. This full post can be found here.

This day was only half because of this stupid UTI. It started kinda okay, but like yesterday we always had to keep our eyes open for restrooms. It is not fun to be on vacation and the only thing you are looking for are toilettes. We did go to Louvre, but the line to get in was probably 2-3 hours so we decided that we would do that big ass museum on Wednesday instead (it is closed on Tuesdays). We walked to the Latin district, went inside Pantheon where Madam Curie is buried. After that I had enough, broke down and went to a health center. They said there were no appointments today but I could get one tomorrow. I started crying and said that it was an emergency, and they said a doctor would see me in one minute. We talked for a short while and he said to sit down and wait for ten minutes and then he would help me. I am surprised, French people aren’t usually very nice. But that was really good service. After only an hour I had taken the first antibiotic pill out of three, one a day for three days. There was an option to get one shot, but for some reason the doctor thought that I wanted to drag the treatment out. I so wish I had that instead. Because those pills made me feel so bad! I have never experienced any side effects from medicine before, but I got almost all of it. I got dizzy, stabbing pains in the back, pretty bad muscle pain, and hard to breathe. Tomorrow I will take the pill when we get home so I don’t have to waste the day because we have a lot of stuff planned tomorrow. The pain went away as soon as we sat down for lunch right after, but that was the end of that day’s adventure. Jesper and I went home and watched a movie while the side effects wore off.

I was feeling much better after three hours and we were ready to go out. First we went to the Eiffel Tower, it is ridiculously close to here, only 10 minutes of walking. We didn’t go up, the line was long and we needed to eat. We walked through Le Jardin du Trocadéro and took the subway to Hard Rock Café. Number 16. Neither of us were very hungry so a pulled chicken sandwich was definitely enough.

Tomorrow we are going up in the Eiffel Tower, down in the catacombs and then up to Sacre-Coeur, the big church. Maybe some shopping to if there is time. It will be a fun day!

Louvre. Le Jardin du Luxemburg. Saint Sulpice. PANO_20150914_123250 Pantheon. The crypt beneath Panteon. It was surprisingly big. I think I will have spaghetti legs at the top tomorrow! Le Jardin du Tracadéro.