A Not So Well Planned Day…

Finally a day where we could sleep in and boy did we. Nic and I were asleep until 10 and laid in bed until around 11. We finally drug ourselves out of bed and headed out. Our plan for the day: go to the Cappuchin Crpyt, Castel St. Angelo and Pizza Al Tiglio. We decided to walk to the crypt as it was only about .75 miles and it was easier than walking to the hot, musty metro. The walk was nice, it had just rained so the ground was wet and slippery. We took our time, popping into a few shops on the way. Once we made it to the Barberini intersection we found the crypt very easily. One problem…the crypt was closed. We made it there around 12:30. The crypt it seems is open from 9-12 and 3-6. We had just missed the open time and had walked the .75 mile just to find that out.

With much reluctancy we made our way into a metro stop and decided to head to lunch at the pizza by the slice place we found on Saturday. From it would be a quick walk to Museo St. Angelo. Pizza, as expected was great. We ordered a couple of our favorites from Saturday and a few new flavors as well. We were thuroughly stuffed before we headed out for the castel.

The castle wasn’t too far of a walk, maybe another .75 miles at the most. We found the main road that led to the castle and followed straight down. As we slowly rounded the castle I saw the enterance sign. Walking up to it I mentioned to Nic that I thought it was weird that no one was up top looking out over Rome. This castle is supposed to have beautiful views of St. Peters and downton Rome. As we got closer to the enterance I realized why no one was up top. The castle is closed on Mondays!!!! Ha, 0/2 today.

Okay, now what? We had tried to make it to 2 museums and hand’t had any luck. Yeah, pizza was good but this was pretty lame. We decided we’d suck it up and take the metro back to the crpyt as it was now after 2:30 and it’d take us at least 45 minutes to get there. We sucked it up just as the skys opened up with rain. Luckily I had noticed that it was raining a bit before we left our hotel room. The rain had subsided before we left our room but we took our jackets just in case. We were glad we did.

The walk/subway back to the crypt was easy enough. We finally realized we needed to move towards the back of the subway because everyone piles into the middle and it’s hot and crowded. We came to our exit and popped off the subway and up a few flights of stairs. The crypt was open again so we headed up the stairs to the enterance. At the top Nic asked that we wait a second because she wasn’t feeling too well. I said okay and we waited outside the enterance for a minute. Not too long after that she says “I need to go to the room, I really don’t feel well, my stomach hurts bad”……okay then! Off to the room we go, only a meter from the enterance to the crpt. Make that 0/3.

A quick metro ride back to the hotel and Nic crawled into bed, not feeling well at all. I asked her to give me any clothes that she needed to have washed so I could head out to the laundromat.

The Laundromat was an experience all in itself. 2 loads of laundry cost $9 to wash and $9 to dry. I put the soap into the laudnry drum, like we do at home, like I did in Tuscany, and was told that I did it wrong and that I needed to buy new soap. The attendent was obviously irritated with me because I didn’t know what I was doing. I told him that’s how I did it last time and he just shook his head at me. HA! Sorry buddy but it all goes into ths ame place eventually. I thought I was going to break the machine with how irritated he was.

He made me buy a 2nd bag of soap and put it into the top of the large washer, the other half of the bag of soap went into the small washer. I closed the lid, payed 10 Euro for the wash cylce which was easier since the machine doesn’t give change. That’s one thing i don’t get in Europe. We have found that a lot of the machines, either vending, metro or laundry don’t give change. But at the same time stores don’t like to give you coins. They like to give you a 5 Euro bill. It’s this weird battle between everyone. Have coins or you have to overpay. Give a store a large bill and they don’t want it. At one point on this trip I actually had a store tell me I couldn’t but water because all I had was a 50 Euro bill and they didn’t want to or couldn’t make change.

Sooooo, anyway. I finished laundry and headed back to check on Nic. She still wasn’t feeling well so she napped till around 7:15. At that point we decided to head out for a bit and went to see The Informant at a local theater. I posted a picture on the previous blog. This was a small, 2 screen theater tucked back in a small ally. The screen and theater were very small but still clean and nice. We were able to enjoy the movie in English with Italian subtitles. After the movie we headed back to our room for some rest. Considering we missed everything we wanted to do today we have a big, final day in Rome.

Ciao Bella.