Spain to Italy, Day Twenty

Today was a very exciting day for me, one where I was hardly able to focus all throughout class because of the emotions that I could barely contain. We were heading to Rome, but before our afternoon flight, we had to go to class and actually learn stuff. Our class was actually held in the city today. Our first stop was in a restaurant that was super top notch called "El Club Allard." Our TA, Matt, is writing his Master's thesis on gastronomy in Spain, so he had organized a tour for us of this extremely fancy restaurant. I would say you should try to eat there at least once, but I'm not even sure its possible to. We were told on the tour that it costs about 130 euros a person to eat at this restaurant. They provide each person with ten different courses throughout the night and you have to book like four months in advance. The dress code is also super intense there. It's like a ball gown and tuxedo type of place. My guess is that you would need a really special occasion to go there (as well as a ton of money obviously). We were also able to tour the kitchen and meet the head chef who was super charged full of amazing energy and really inspiring. She immigrated to Spain from the Dominican Republic about twelve years ago and started as a dish washer at this restaurant. She kept asking if she could do something more than just that at the restaurant, to which the owners replied that they would only let her if she worked on it in her spare time for free. But she slowly began to build credibility with them and climbed her way to the top. She was super excited about telling this story and we were all pretty emotional and excited listening to it. We were ready to take on the world by the end of the tour.

After our time at the restaurant, we walked around a nearby park, which was rather difficult considering we had all of our luggage with us for Rome since we were planning on heading straight to the airport as soon as class was dismissed. After an hour walk across gravelly terrains and many flights of stairs, we were finally dismissed and bolted to the subway to get to the airport. We arrived in plenty of time and had no difficulties getting through security or back to our gate. We were well on our way by 3:30 p.m. first to our connection in Munich, Germany and then onto Rome.

Seeing as none of us had ever been in Germany before, we decided to make the most of our layover and sample the German delicacies. Here is palabra del dia by the way! The word for Germany in Spanish is "Alemania". I'm super confused why we don't just call other countries what they want to be called. Like we call them Germany, Spain calls them Alemania, but they call themselves Deutschland. Like why can't everyone just use Deutschland? If anyone has an explanation for this, please fill me in.

This beer actually wasn't that great. Neither were the chips. My friend had a beer very similar to Blue Moon though called Erdinger and that was really good. If anyone likes grapefruit, I also recommend Schofer Hoeffer. It's really sweet though.

After our connection in Germany/Alemania/Deutschland, we had a short, one hour flight over to Rome, where we didn't even have to go through customs when we landed (not gonna lie, I wish I had an Italy stamp in my passport right now). We took a cab to our hotel, which we determined was in a super sketchy area upon arrival, but agreed it would have to do for a couple of days. We got settled into our hostel, and by the time we were done, it was about bed time. We sat down and planned out the next day's activities and then headed to bed so that we were well rested for a full day of sight seeing and fare sampling.