Rome Part I: Unfortunate Arrival

Alright everybody, here's part one of our stay in Rome. I wrote this yesterday with the intention of putting them up then, sorry....again.
Part Two and if necessary Three will be up soon.
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Alright everybody, as I said last night, sorry it’s been so long. I guess I’ll just get right down to it.
So on Sunday we all hopped on our groups big travel bus and set off for Rome from Florence. From what everybody said, it’s about a three hour drive. Well, we were driving out of Florence by 09:00, but we didn’t get to Rome until close to 17:00. There are a couple reasons for this. First of all, it’s because we had to take 2 or 3 rest stop breaks along the way (including one where Sydney literally followed me into the men’s bathroom, which was pretty hilarious because most everyone in there saw her and started laughing) and we also took a 3 hour stop in a town called Seina.
Seina felt and looked a lot like Florence. It was much more hilly, though. Apparently the city was built upon a valley/mountain combination, and so there were all kinds of steep streets going down into the square and things like that. It was a nice city, just like Florence was, but I’d had my fill after about 30 minutes of the allotted 3 hours. I’m sure part of that is the fact that we have to walk everywhere. I think the only days I got to bed without my feet hurting are the days we spend on the bus traveling, and then my legs hurt from being cramped up for so long. Haha. Oh, one thing over here that I don’t understand the concept of is paying to use a public restroom. All the bathrooms in Seina had a 0.50 cent entrance fee, and since I didn’t have a 0.50 cent piece, I ended up having to pay a Euro to take a piss. I know you’re wondering why I didn’t ask for change, and there’s a reason for it, but it’s long and probably wouldn’t make a lot of sense if I were to write it, so take my word for it, there was nothing I could have done.
Anyway, we’re back on the bus and we finally start getting closer to Rome. You can tell because of all the graffiti. Rome is a lot more modern than Florence, and it looks a lot more run-down (no offense to any of you who like Rome, just sharing my opinion). I’ve yet to see a segment of wall (or similar structure) 100-meters long without any signs of graffiti. The stuff is just everywhere. It just feels a lot more like a city, in the sense that we know of, like New York. Florence felt very separated from the city-feeling, whereas Rome exudes it. If that makes sense…I’m writing at 8:22 and I’m still a little sleepy.
At first I was pretty worried about our hotel. I mean, literally the entire ground floor of the outside is covered with hundreds of little paper-sized posters, which makes it look kind of dumpish, so I was surprised when we walked into the lobby and found polished tile floors and hanging chandeliers and just overall a very nice looking place. Don’t judge a book by its cover, I suppose. The lobby is easily nicer than the one of the hotel in Florence, so I was kinda excited about seeing our room and things. Unfortunately, we got a little bit shafted with our room. Never before have I seen a hotel with so many different room designs. There are at least 6 or 7, in a pretty small little five story place. Naturally, we ended up with the smallest of the room designs. The elevator is literally less than two feet away from our door, and I think it’s safe to say the size of our room is about half that of what Sydney and Lindsay are enjoying while we’re here. To give you an idea, we have a little 12-inch tv sitting in our room which is likely no less than a decade old, while Sydney and Lindsay have got a 26-inch LG Plasma up in there’s. Talk about luck of the draw.
We didn’t do much of anything on our first night here. A bunch of us went and bought some giant pizzas and brought them back to the hotel to each. It was okay, but not fantastic. I think a bunch of us have decided to go somewhere actually nice one night while we’re still in Italy. We’ve been trying to save money more than anything, and so we’ve yet to find any legitimately great food, which sucks because we’re in Italy which is supposed (I think) to have great food.
Yesterday, though, we went to check out a large chunk of ancient Rome. We took the subway (also graffiti’d!) to the Colosseum, and walked around for 3 hours behind Professor Lewcock as he told us about the Roman Forum and all that jazz. Again, most of this stuff doesn’t really matter to me. I don’t really know why, but old buildings and sightseeing and all of that just gets old really, really fast for me. After touring the forum we headed towards the Colosseum and spent an hour or so in there. Again, not very interesting for me. But I did see something exciting though! There was a kitty in the Colosseum, and I was going to pet it but Sydney made me leave because the rest of the group was already gone. It was funny though, as we left she commented on how when I saw the cat is was the first time I looked excited all day. A man’s got to have his priorities.
On the way back from Rome we stopped in a place called Termini (a station whose name I remember thanks to Zelda: Majora’s Mask, whose setting is called Termina) to grab some groceries and whatnot. Sydney and I also spent an hour or so scavenger hunting for an Ethernet cable, since the wireless connection in the hotel is awful.
When we got back we all went up to Sydney/Lindsay’s room to eat our groceries, and Sydney made some more of her accidental sexual innuendos by commenting on how she was going to stretch out her lower jaw because her sandwich was too “big” and “hard” to fit into her mouth properly. I was the only guy in the room, but I wasn’t the only one laughing so I didn’t feel bad about thinking it was funny. The girls also started planning a day trip on Thursday (our free day) to Pompeii. I don’t know if I’m going to go; I might just stay at the hotel and catch up on sleep before doing some work on Book 3, since I haven’t had much time to do that yet. Who knows.