Roma

So reopening my blog once again, since i recently realised it existed. This time its mainly to document my Eurotrip. Bharat and I are on a 50 day tour of Euro and will hopefully have a nice experience travelling through Europe by ourselves for the first time. We also had some support in the form of our uncle in Frankfurt.

After flying in to Frankfurt, we headed out asap to the station and took the train to get to Rome. The first thing we realised was that reservations are a bitch! Our daily budget was 50 Euro each and the booking for the first connection itself took 17.5! The reason was that we were using a premium night train, which did a 2 hour journey in 5 hours and gave us a place to sleep for the night as opposed to waiting for the morning train in some obscure station. We thought that was bad till we got to Switzerland. Voila!! another train booking from Brig to Milan and this time it was 22.5 Euros each! Out of the 22.5 Euro, 10 Euro was the charge for making the reservation at the station, as opposed to over the net. This is when we got to know that we could actually do it over the net. Rutvik after 3 months in Europe said that there is no way to find out what the reservations costs are and there is no way to book it online.

In any case http://railtrains.raileurope.com/us/rail/point_to_point/passholderrequest.htm is the link to reserve online or to get an idea of how much it costs. I think there is also a surcharge they take for booking it online, so booking online is cheaper for Switzerland, but probably not for all other places, which don’t charge you extra for booking at the station.

In any case Milan to Rome cost us another 10 Euro each and that was it for our daily budget, trains itself cost us 50 Euro each, just to get from Frankfurt to Rome. However, Rome is one hell of a city and after we took a hostel, all we did from 4-7:30 was walk around. This was our route: Day 1 Route

Basically, we covered a lot of nice areas like the Spanish steps, the Trevi fountain, which was quite Grand, the Panthenon and some other places which wouldn’t really feature on a tourists handbook, but were quite good none the less. There is the Piazza di Venezia and the Tearto Argentina and Piazza de Republico, all of which are nice places to visit.

The next day, we went to the Colloseum, one of the ancient wonders of the world. Its quite majestic and although most of it is ruined, it is well worth the hype. I didn’t know that all the marble from the Colloseum was taken basically to build the Basilica in the Vatican! In any case, we took a guided tour and it was quite interesting, since we had no real previous knowledge about the Colloseum. After the Colloseum, we again took a walk around the area and found a few more monuments, one was basically what used to the a club (the bridge and swimming pool kind, not the weird music and awkward dance kind) for ancient Romans and also found circus Massimo, which was their race track, where they used to have their chariot races. Rome is basically a lovely city to walk around, you will find nice architecture and good eating joints all over the place, however, it is not a city to visit on a budget, because we kept finding one nice restaurant after another and wanted to splurge on food.

One thing though is that Rome is full of thieves. They are all thieves.. not just the thieves, but also the tour guides, the restaurant owners, the police, everyone! If you thought that India was bad, think Bihar and then think again. In restaurants, they will stare you down if you don’t order at least for 20 Euros each, "free tour guides will cost you 15 euros and the "student" discounts will only be for Europeans. 

Once again, we spent the day walking around town and also visited the Roman Forum, Pallatino  and a couple of new piazzas: Navona and Campo de Fiori (Route). I was totally taken in by the city and just kept wondering why Delhi doesn’t have the number of tourists that Rome does. Delhi, just like Rome is also a museum as a city. There is as much, if not more history in Delhi as well, however the old part of Delhi, unlike that of Rome is just a mess. If a tourist enters the Chandani Chowk area or tries to get to the Old Fort, they will die simply out of shock. I think Delhi has the potential to be one of the top tourist destinations of the world, but we simply don’t utilize our resources well. There is no marketing what so ever. Humayun’s Tomb is as big as the Taj Mahal and nobody comes to visit it. Right next to it is Khan-e-Khana Tomb and nobody outside of our colony and the ASI has heard of it. A stones throw away is Lodhi garden, which once again is full of old structures nobody really cares about. We live in the middle of all this history and don’t really bother because we don’t really know its significance. People here tell their stories with such passion that we get taken in by that, but are not really aware of what happened right next to us. I honestly don’t know anything about Delhi either, but a city that was built 7 times!! I think there is a lot more history than we give it credit for and I honestly feel it should attract more tourists that it does as of now.

The last day in Rome was reserved for the Vatican. After a 6-7 Km walk, we reached the main plaza and it was actually quite a grand sight. All the marble stolen from the Colloseum was put to good use. Although we intended to get it done quickly, we went in and couldn’t stop clicking and just looking at everything with wonder. The main basilica was quite grand and we also went to the top of the dome. The view from the dome was pretty good as well, I think it must be pretty much the highest point in the city. Anyways, we also did the long and boring Vatican Museum after that, the only real interesting (and familiar) part of the thing was the Sistine Chapel in the end and frankly it was pretty good. Its a lot better if you have the time and probably a guide, if not, its still a decent place to visit.

Once again, the last day was consumed by walking around to different piazzas and a park: the Villa Borghese (Route). Along the way, we grabbed gelatos from a few locations and basically this was what we found, the most expensive and famous place: Tre Scalini also had the most average gelato. The street side vendors and the normal roadside shops like Blue Ice were the better ones and the ones close to tourist locations were obviously more expensive.

Anyways, with this, we pretty much finished our tour of Rome and I genuinely feel that its a brilliant place for any tourist, you can walk around all day and keep running into new and awesome locations. The architecture is brilliant and the food as well, just that we were on a budget and I would advise you to spend a bit on the food.