Italy is kicking Greece's ass

We made it to Italy without any problems! The past 2 and a half days were spent in Rome. Yes, we were in Rome! I still can't belive that we're actually here!

Day 1- Our flight landed in the afternoon, so we had the afternoon| evening to explore. The city is beautiful! Even when it is over crowded with tourists like ourselves, it is very pretty with a piazza litterally on every corner and a fountain to accompany them. You can drink out of the fountains too! The water is extremely refreshing and twice as fun to drink than from the hose because it came from a ROMAN FOUNTAIN! Of course, we had pizza and pasta outside on a patio with a checkered table cloth for dinner and then walked around licking our gelato. Ice cream here not only tastes better, but they cram three scoops of different flavors onto your cone, put whip cream on top with a sugar cookie. I will come home 10 pounds heavier, FYI. Unfortunatly, because we didn't have any time or resources to look for a hostel last minuet, we spent the night in the airport. While many people were there doing exactly as we were, one night is enough for us to make a vow never to have to do it again!

Day 2- After we stash our luggage at the train station (which is 4 stories and 2 square blocks huge), we take the Metro to the Vatican. Not only is it Sunday, but it is the last Sunday of the month, which means: Free Sunday. Translation: by 9am when we arrived, the line to the front was already 3\4 around the city wall! Fortunately, we joined up with a tour group for a little extra euros to skip the line. The museum was great- sooooo many statues that all start to look the same, but still very intersting. And our tour guide was entertaining. As we were about to go up the stairs to the corridor to the Sisten Chapel, I take this opotunity to accidently separate myself from the group and I get lost in Vatican City. Yes, I am retarded. As a art history major and a self proclaim lover of art, I am ashamed to say that I did not get the chance to relish in the Sisten Chapel as much as I wanted to. I did get to see it! but, I was worried the tour group was way ahead of me and I blew through it to try to catch up with them. It was a beautiful ceiling. Every other church now will just seem boring with a bunch of marble- we should have saved the best for last :) Fortunately, I was able to find Elise at the exit of St. Peter's church and I was able to spend some time looking up at Michangelo's dome to make up for missing his ceiling. This church is quite impressive too!
Next, we went to get lunch (more pizza and pasta, duh) and then set out to find the Pantheon. However, we had the worst map in the history of maps and wound up finding the Colessum (with a few other neat ruin sites and momunets on the way). We took another guided tour like we did at the Vatican. Elise was ready for nap and blanked out a lot of the tour, but I really liked it! Again, it was very impressive.
Next plan of the day was to find a place to sleep tonight. We tracked down a very quaint hostel from the guide book and fortunately they had beds available. BEDS!!! We've been traveling for 5 nights and this is the first time we're been able to sleep on a matress! Not only were we able to sleep horizontally comfortably, we met some very friendly English friends and spent the night talking on the rooftop terrace over wine, cheese, and chocolate. Yes, this really did happen.

Day 3: While Rome was great, we were done with it and already we are behind on our itenary, so we validated out Eurail passes for Florence. We had time to kill before the train, so we explored the Pantheon and Treve Fountain, both worth seeing on our extra day. They were enhaced with more gelato and fountain drinking too. We spent so much time wondering around the city and trying to buy fruit and bread for dinner on the train that we missed the train we wanted to take and camped out at the station for another hour till the next one. 4 hours later we arrive in Florence! Our luck hasn't run out yet either because evem though we arrived at 11:30pm, we found a hostel instantly and it is great! It's huge with showers! A bed and shower are my two favorite things right now :) kidding. We just walked around the city for a little bit because there is a lot of night life in Florence apparenly. We just sipped lemonchello outside on the patioand discovered that it is actually not very good. Imagine taking a bottle of vodka and sqeezing a single lemon in it with a spoonful of sugar and that is lemonchello (a 5 euros a glass no less!). Whatever, I had lemonchello in Italy and that is awesome!

That leads us up to now. I was going to try to add pictures, but my hour of internet is almost up. It's free here at the hostel, so I will try tomorrow for sure! We're safe and having a great time so far! Hope all is well with you at home.