Adventures in Rome Part One

Woohoo! It's time for a little holiday with the boyfriend. If you'd like to know our experiences continue reading... 

Monday 

On Monday afternoon we flew to Rome, Italy. We arrived a little before six p.m., and we took a shuttle service to the central station. From there we decided to walk to our apartment, which took us around 20 minutes. It was a little weird at first, because it was already dark outside and that made everything seem different than it is by day. However, there was a still a lot going on so overall we didn't have a negative first impression. 

We booked a great apartment, with everything we need and a convenient location from where we can walk to aaall the city highlights! What I really loved was that we were welcomed by Francesco, a young guy who could tell us all about the places to go and restaurants to eat: "You have to go here, they cook like my grandmother." he said. We've never met her but he spoke with such respect that we immediately decided we had to try it! (We walked all the way over there on Wednesday to find out they were on holiday *sad face*) 

We ate at a restaurant close by the apartment, where I had the best pasta dish I've ever had.... NO JOKE. It was so simple, subtle and modest, yet soooo tasteful! A ravioli with ricotta and spinach coated with butter and sage, which I'm definitely recreating when I get home ;) look forward to a recipe soon!

Tuesday 

The boyfriend went out to get some breakfast, which is a little expensive here. Later we learned that it is way cheaper to get breakfast at one of the bars, which we hope to try later. If you take a bar seat you should be able to get coffee for a euro, and the (extremely sweet) pastries should be reasonably priced as well. If you take a seat at a table, however, it can cost you around six (!!) euros per coffee.... Btw, I plan to upload a "tips and tricks" post about Rome when I get home, where I will note some more handy things to know before visiting. 

For the morning we booked a 3 hour bike tour trough the city, like the true Dutchies we are! We had a really nice Dutch tour guide, and were accompanied by another young Dutch couple as well. Cycling trough Rome isn't as scary as I thought, but it was nice to be able to follow our guide with all the cars racing past us. There are no cycling paths you see, so you have to decide whether to cycle on the road or on the sidewalk, which can sometimes be a little tricky.
We cycled to many tourist highlights, and saw so many incredible sights. Really, if you get a chance: rent a bike. It's fast, it's rather cheap and you get to see so many sights in little time! During the tour we had a coffee at one of the best cafés in Rome (and it only cost us €1.10). We drank it while standing at the bar, together with many others. 

We really enjoyed this day, partly because of the lovely sunshine in our faces! Have really missed that. Still cold here though, around 6 degrees but with improvement later on in the week. But it's not that bad, especially since the sun is shining quite often these days. 

For lunch we bought a sandwich and salad to go. If you know your restaurants, even a simple sandwich will taste good... We've been quite lucky so far! Afterwards we visited the Colosseum, and walked around some more. So many things to see, and so many pictures taken... There goes my free Dropbox space ;) We had so much fun people-gazing, I can't even begin to describe. People with selfie sticks (think about it: a photo album filled with pictures of a famous sight but your face is right in the middle, blocking half of the view), nearly professional photographer husbands/boyfriends, taking "spontaneous" pictures of their lady who is staring in the distance, or absent-mindedly sightseeing (*cough posing cough*), the average middle aged man, posing for a VERY serious picture of himself with something in the background (can be anything, really. From the sixteenth chapel to a random fountain), and literally thousands of people taking the standard tourist pictures (okay fine, we might be guilty too). Hilarious. 

After walking and cycling around all day we were extremely tired (more than 20 kms while we normally only walk... Well, about 1) so we went back to the apartment. Previous guests left behind some Lonely planet guides, which I searched for a nice place to eat pizza. We decided on "Da Francesco". After waiting outside for 10 minutes (yep, that crowded!) we were seated at a tiny table in the 'I don't know how they can fit this many people in but they managed' tiny restaurant space. There were tables of 4 that would seat 2 couples that didn't know each other but nobody cared! This raised our expectations, even though the waiters were quite rude. Well, maybe rude is not the right word but they didn't have any friendliness to them like we are used to. However, service was really fast! We received our laaaarge beers quite soon, and after about 12 minutes our pizzas came too. They were really thin, and came straight out of a wood fired oven. Loads of cheese and thinly sliced mushrooms, so tasty! Definitely worth the walk. And rather cheap, too: for 2 large beers and 2 pizza's we paid less than 30 euros.


That's it for today, see you next time.
The next blog will contain the rest of the days: stay posted!
Also, a tips and tricks for Rome blog will follow soon after. See ya!