When In ROMA Part 1

You might know this already but I went to Italy earlier this month for an 8-day holiday with my friend Joon Tian. Initially, we weren't planning for a trip for two. One day (I can't rmb when it was), I was alone in my aunt's place and I just felt like I needed to check up on how Joon Tian was doing. I already had an idea of asking her whether she was interested in joining me on some travels. So when we started chatting, she mentioned that her friends were planning for a trip to Italy and she invited me to join them. I obviously didn't know any of her friends so I hesitated for a bit but I thought, why not? It'll be good to make new friends... or it might turn out to be really awkward. However, after some time, when we needed to start booking our plane tickets, we realised that we weren't sure when our exams were going to end. The date for the last day of the semester for me was on the 6th of June and Joon Tian's was on the 4th and her friends had different dates. But her friends had already booked their tickets for the 5th, if I don't remember wrongly. Only the two of us hadn't bought our tickets by that time so we figured that we shouldnt take the risk. We decided to wait till our exam timetables are out, then only buy our plane tickets. That meant that it was just going to be the two of us. I was totally fine with that, I thought it'll be great.

In the end, we booked our flight (Ryanair) to Rome for the 4th of June! When I finished my exams (before she finished hers), I started planning for our trip. We booked our hotels earlier in April so I had to plan our whole itinerary, which was quite fun but a bit stressful because being the pessimistic person I am, I kept worrying about everything bad that could happen. But everything was fine. On the 4th, I left for Rome from London (Stansted Airport) and Joon Tian went from Manchester and thankfully Rome's Ciampino airport is really small, we found each other really easily. There were some delays to our flights because apparently, the boss of those people in charged of loading/unloading baggages at Ciampino Airport went bankrupt. So all the employees went on strike which meant, no one was working at the airport. So they had trouble unloading the baggages from the plane into the airport when we landed. But, thank god our flights were morning flights (I had to wake up at 3.30am to get ready!) because when I checked the news about this incident, the flights later that day were all canceled!

Continuing on... We took at bus from Ciampino Airport to Termini Station. From there we took a train to Trastevere, which was where our hotel/hostel (i dont know what to call it). Termini Station was a nightmare for us. We just landed in Rome and we may have looked very clueless so there were these creeps at the station that kept wanting to help us buy our tickets. We wasted some time there because the stupid person at the counter didn't have change and so we had to go buy something to get change. Even when doing that we had to keep avoiding those creepy people. And it seemed like everyone was speaking Italian so we were just very confused. We did get our tickets in the end and got on this very very hot and stuffy train where they didn't have a voice operator to announce the stops so we had to be super alert not to miss our stop.

We then safely got to Trastevere and thought we finally could rest a bit at the place we booked but... sigh... we found the place but we didnt have a way to contact the owner to let him know we have reached. The place we booked was a small apartment and we were stupid not to get the contact number of the owner. Joon Tian was the one who booked the room and contacted the owner but when we reached, we didnt have internet/wifi to email the owner to let him know we reached the place. So... we got help from a guy that came out of the building, who got help from an old man cleaning the porch of the building. My friend had to use her 3G (which definitely costed her some money) to email the owner again and thankfully, he got the email. We waited outside the building with the guy and the old man who were so so kind to help us for about 30 minutes before the owner, Federico, arrived. He was really friendly too. He showed us the apartment and told us how to get around Rome. 

This is the living room of the apartment. Isnt it nice? It's a really spacious apartment for just the two of us and it had high ceilings which you dont get in flats in London. 

The kitchen, which we didnt really use, except for getting water.

The place looks really nice right? I was saying that I would love to just stay there if I ever decide to move to Rome. LOL 

Well, we loved our stay there. The only downside of the place was that it's a bit far from the city centre. You could take the bus/tram which could save you a lot of time, but we preferred to walk and save money although it wasnt that expensive to take the tram.

This is like, the kind of apartments with this kind of lifts where I only saw in movies (normally in rom-coms) and I've always thought they were really beautiful. It was nice to personally live in a place like that for 3 days.

The exterior of the apartment! It's quite modern compared to all the other buildings in Rome.

We were both quite tired that day so we just wanted to take it easy so we decided to just walk around Trastevere area which had less tourists compared to the city centre.

Our first stop was to experience shopping in a Rome supermarket! haha We just wanted some snacks and some breakfast for the next morning.

This just looked very interesting. It seemed like Italians love these things.

We walked along the roads of Trastevere and reached Fiume Tevere, the Tevere River. And the trees look like broccoli. kekeke

It was quite nice walking along the river because the trees gave you shade. It was just so hot under the sun.

It's kind of impossible for me to rmb all the names of all the rivers there is in Rome. There's just too many of them!

Although it was hot but we have to be thankful it didnt rain or else all our plans would have been ruined because all the places we were visiting in Italy required us to do a lot of walking outdoors. Unlike places in Asia where you could just hide in a shopping centre when it rains. I don't think I saw any shopping centres in Italy. There arent a lot of modern things there which made it even more unique and beautiful, it was like you are living in a totally different age. 

I just love these small stone roads

We saw this string of leaves and decided we must walk down this road LOL. we were basically just walking around Trastevere without a map so we had no idea where we were but everything was beautiful.

Santa Maria Basilica. 

Piazza Santa Maria. This place is suppose to look really nice at night but we weren't there at night so I cant say whether it really is beautiful at night.

We then went to have our first Italian dinner! We had no idea which restaurant served nice food so we just followed other people or just observed the amount of people at the restaurant. And their menu.

We shared a huge pizza and for starters, we chose a suppli, which is risotto with tomato sauce and cheeeese. which was really nice! The piazza was okay. Not as amazing as I expected it to be.

We then took a slow walk back to our apartment and rested our legs which were already in pain after one day of walking. Thankfully the wifi in the apartment was fast because we spent most of our time in the apartment facing our phones. LOL Unfortunately the wifi connection wasnt that good from the bedroom so we spent all our time in the living room. And there was only one channel on tv that was in english hahaha

Will blog for the following days of my trip next~