Italy, Day Twenty-One

Today was quite the adventure, and not all good I might add... Do you want the good or the bad first? Well I'm going to work chronologically so here comes the bad. We woke up around 9:00 and left our hostel shortly after to begin our first day in the Italian capital. Our first stop was to the metro station to purchase a some passes for our short stay in Rome. I received a stroke of misfortune as we tried to step onto our first metro train to head towards the Roman Colosseum and was pickpocketed! And I know exactly how they did it too! It's a little difficult to explain over text but what it boils down to is that there was a team of two girls, one who was the distraction and the other was the thief. The distraction girl was standing in front of me before we got onto the train and basically took two steps onto the train and then stopped moving to the back of the train like a normal person would do. She then proceeded to make it very difficult for me to move around her so I could get onto the train, all the while, her friend was digging in my purse and snatched my wallet. The two stepped off the train before it even left the station with my wallet. I realized about five seconds afterwards what had happened and was flooded with all kinds of emotions. I was angry, but I was also fighting back tears. But mostly, I was just in shock. Literally twenty minutes into my first day in this beautiful city, I lost everything. My cash, my credit cards, my driver's license, my student ID, the metro pass I had just purchased for Rome, my metro pass for Madrid which I was going to need for another two weeks once I got back to Spain, along with a couple of other rewards cards. Once we realized what happened, we exited the subway at the next station and walked back to the one where I had been robbed at. We proceeded to the police station, where we learned that it was going to be a very long process to file a police report. They had only gotten twenty euros off of me though and I had already called my parents to get my cards shut off (not that they know how to use an American credit card anyways I'm sure) so they really didn't get much of a gain off of me, so in the end, we decided not to file a report. Had I had a longer stay in Rome, I would have filed one but we had already wasted a good chunk of the first day dealing with this situation, and frankly, it just didn't seem worth it. Fortunately, my parents were able to wire me some money through Western Credit Union so I wasn't broke. I took to putting all of the important things in my purse in my bra though like my phone, my passport (when I had to carry it with me otherwise it was in the hostel), and all of my cash. So unless the next robber wanted to dig around in my sweaty bra for my cash, there was no way I was getting robbed again. It was a rough experience that took about three and a half hours to deal with in total, but we moved past it quickly enough and then hopped back on the metro (the pickpocketing girls nowhere to be found obviously) and proceeded yet again toward the Roman Colosseum.

So we got off at the Colosseum station around 1:00 pm and decided that although we had originally planned to start here, we were going to work our way backwards. But not before lunch. Check out the delicious food that I had for my first meal in Italy:

This is a pizza with mushrooms and sausage with grilled zucchini on the side. Both were a little burnt but the pizza at least was still really good!

After we ate, we headed to our first stop: the Pantheon. This was one of my favorite sites in Rome. Not just because it was free but just because there was so much to learn! For example, if you break down the name of the site in Latin, Pan means all and Theon means god, which shows that this was a temple of worship for all of the gods of the ancient Roman world. This brings me to our palabra del dia. If you want to say that something is really old or ancient, you would call it "antiguo" in Spanish (I know we're in Italy right now, but the point of the palabra is to help you learn Spanish so there you go). I also learned that this temple was constructed in 120 A.D., during the height of the Roman Empire. I was also told that there hasn't been much repairing or reconstruction done to it since the date of its construction so that was pretty cool. The only significant change is that while the original Pantheon was adorned with statues of Roman gods and goddesses, when Catholicism came to Italy, these statues were replaced with Christian saints instead. The famous Italian artist, Rafael, also has his final resting place beneath one of these statues in the Pantheon which is pretty neat.

The outside of the Pantheon

The inside of the Pantheon

Once we left the Pantheon, we made our first gelato stop of the trip, where I found I was craving mint. I know this is one of my typical icecream flavors back home but I just couldn't help myself. As my girl Selena Gomez would say, the heart wants what it wants. So I had some mint gelato. It actually turned out to be my least favorite of all the gelato flavors I tried this trip, but more on that later.

My first true gelato experience, success!

Our next stop was the Roman Forum, which if you are anything like me, you have no idea what that was. When I first heard of it, it sounded like a plaza or something really small, but it is actually the "antiguo" ruins of the Roman Empire that thrived from 500 B.C. to 500 A.D. which span over five acres of hilly and rocky land. I saw very sites in this area including the infamous location where Julius Caesar was stabbed during his rein of power. I learned that after his brutal murder, which I saw in an illustration of in a tapestry later this trip, Caesar became the first human man to become a God under the command of the Romans. Obviously this went out the window when Catholicism set in, but the Romans used to have lots of gods in their pagan religion, and Caesar become one of them some time in the past. Check out all these cool pics I took of the Roman Forum while I was there. It was definitely not at all what I was expecting:

This is the Arc of Titus. It was erected as a celebration monument in regards to the Roman victory over the Jewish revolt who clearly didn't agree with the Roman's gods.

An overview of the ruins I saw

This is where Julius Caesar was murdered. Not sure why they put a tin roof over this section of ruins but that wasn't there originally. It was just a little arc that was out of the open.

I can't remember what this building was (a temple maybe?) but it was pretty to me and it was one of the most well preserved buildings I saw. Can you believe this is 2000 years old?

We actually had another little complication while we were at the Roman Forum. So the group we had in Rome consisted of my roommate Maria who I have previously mentioned and then two other girls from our study abroad group, Amanda and Michelle. Well Maria and I had downloaded a Rick Steve's walking tour for the Forum before we arrived and the other girls had not, so they told us they were going to go explore on their own, but they would meet up with us later. So Maria and I were on our own for a little while, but somehow she got ahead of me in the tour, and I ended up losing her. I initially thought this was no big deal because we had the same tour, so she would probably wait for me at the end of it. Well I get to the last spot on the tour, and Maria is nowhere to be found. So I start checking all the areas around the Forum and I still can't find her. I walked the whole five acres back to the beginning only to find no one, and then back to the exit, and then back to the beginning one more time. Still no one. By now it had been an hour and a half of myself alone and I was frantic. The Forum was closing and I knew where nobody was. I was forced to exit and then scoured the grounds for any sort of familiar face. I eventually ran into Maria about twenty minutes after the Forum closed though. She told me that she accidentally exited the Forum once the tour was over and they wouldn't let her back in afterwards, so she had been frantically running around trying to find us too. So now we had each other but unfortunately we didn't know where Amanda and Michelle were. We waited by the metro station for them for a while thinking that they would surely have to go that way at some point to get back to the hostel but they never made it there. We gave up after half an hour of waiting and just went back to our hostel. They eventually showed up there and messaged us when they got on the WiFi but by now it was 8:00 p.m. and the Colosseum was closed so we had to push that to the next day. I was just glad that they made it back safely. We didn't realize how difficult it would be to contact each other without working phones in Italy or data to use the internet without a WiFi connection. So lesson learned, we decided to stick together as a group at all times for the rest of the trip.

We had worked up a sweat in all the commotion of trying to find each other in the Forum, so we showered and cleaned up as quickly as we could and then headed to dinner around 9:00. We decided to dine close to the Spanish Steps, which are actually of virtually no significance in Rome. They are just a pretty monument. Nevertheless we took some pictures there and were also swarmed and badgered by lots of shady salesmen trying to sell us "selfie sticks." I almost purchased one just so that I could beat them with it and have them leave me alone. Amanda actually threatened to punch one of them in the throat if he asked her one more time if she wanted to buy one. She is a little ball of fire if you can't tell.

We made it to dinner around 9:30 though and gorged ourselves in a three course meal. Unfortunately, I forgot to take a picture of my dessert, which was kind of like a chocolate, Italian flan, but here are my other courses of the night:

I ordered an appetizer or "antipasti" if you really want an Italian vocab word, which consisted of three different types of bruschetta: one with tomatoes and basil, one with garlic and butter, and one called nbuja, which I don't really know what it had on it but it was something extremely spicy. It had my nose running all night.

My main course: mushroom risotto! This is one of my favorite Italian dishes so I was really excited to see this on the menu.

We closed down the restaurant and started walking back to the subway at like 11:45, only to discover that the subway had closed early (it was supposed to close at midnight). So we had to walk over a mile to get back to our hostel and by the time we got there, I was about dead. I had left dinner extremely full from our heavy pasta dinner and thought I might throw up if I didn't get some stretchy pants on soon. I made it back to the hostel with no unfortunate occurrences though, which was pretty much a miracle. I managed to keep everything down and fell asleep as soon as my head hit my pillow, exhausted from the crazy adventure that was our first day in Rome.