A Whole New World

"boun giorno."     " Molte bene."    "Arrivederci!"

What a day today has been. We arrived in Rome around 10am Monday morning after an 8 hour plane ride from Canada (Oh Canada!! - yes, I sang that song the entire time.), a two hour lay over in Canada and a 3 hour plane ride from Colorado to Canada. It was a long day. We were ready to be in Rome and then we stood in line at Customs for 3 hours. 3 hours! For 3 hours we stood in this mob of hundreds of people from ALL over. We met a nice family from Canada (Oh Canada!) and chatted with them to help the time move quicker. We took a crazy ride in a taxi to our hotel and after waiting months and months to get to Italy we napped and it felt wonderful. I took a nap in Rome! Don't worry we eventually ventured out right around dinner time...well what would be considered dinner time in the states. Turns out Italians don't even open places to eat until 7 or 7:30pm. So what did we do? We did what any good American tourist would do and apparently any good Italian would do-we ate gelato! It seems that it is what you do here around 5pm. Everyone around was enjoying gelato.

We spent the next few hours walking around and exploring. We tried to talk to people which proved to be much more difficult than we thought. The advice we got was that most people in the bigger cities speak English, however, that was not true. I have never felt more out of place. It gave me such a new meaning to Ariel's song, A Whole New World! However, as the night went on and the more we became familiar with the city and it's people the more comfortable we felt. We ate dinner at a family owned place and it was fabulous. Mom and Grandma ordered coffee at the end of the night. I did not, however, because I remember reading in Rick Steve's book that coffee means espresso here in Italy. Sure enough a tiny little coffee cup comes out for them full of espresso.

So here I am at 11:10pm so ready to go to sleep and my mom and grandma are wide awake. Tomorrow begins the real adventure in Rome. Two days full of sight seeing and eating! Until then-Arrivederci!