When in Rome....

We made it to Rome!

Farva is from the movie "Super Troopers", Eileen nailed it!

We have not run into any bed bugs or anything else too bad, our hostel in poland had a moldy shower but it was only one night so we managed. I had researched all of our hostels pretty extensively, reading reviewss, getting ratings, all of that, before booking any of them. We also sleep in silk sleep sacks just in case. Sometimes I look around for bedbugs too, I haven't found any.

Since our last blog we've been to Florence and Pisa. Florence smells like poo. We were there two nights and when we came in on the first afternoon we opened the door to our room (Which was nice) and we both said it smelled like eggs. Then the next day, eggs again. Then James figured it out, after looking out the window (Which we decided to keep shut), in some old cities, the storm drains and the sewer drains are the same. Most places have separate drains. Every time the neighbors flushed the toilet we could hear it emptying into the storm drain.

The Duomo (Santa Maria del Fiore) in Florence was incredible though. I don't remember all of the history behind it but it's one of the 1st of its kind and most of the technology used to build it had to be invented at that time. It's double shelled (we're not sure why) and we went all the way up to the top, which means you go up 463 stairs, on crazy staircases between the two shells. The stairs in many places are only a 1 and a half feet wide with the slope of the dome right over head, most people had to hunch over. That was pretty much the extent of Florence, we went to a few other places but none compared to the duomo.

The Leaning Tower of Pisa was really cool too, and we took those really stupid tourist shots of us pretending to hold it up. There's really not much else in Pisa besides the tower. We didn't go in it because it's really expensive.

Today we went to the Vatican. We're going to go back bright and early tomorrow and go up into St. Peter's Basilica, the line was too long today. Then we went to the Spanish Steps and Trevi Fountain. Both were mobbed with tourists but we still got some good pictures in. Tomorrow we're going to see the rest of the sights. We wanted to let ourselves rest a little bit this evening.

This hostel has a kitchen so we made dinner, shopping at grocery stores is always an adventure. We had wanted to make beek stroganoff but couldn't find any sour cream. When we were in Interlaken we made Tacos but didn't know what kind of cheese to buy, and we made a bad choice and had cheeseless tacos. Tomorrow for breakfast we're having scrambnled eggs with procuitto, we can't wait. Most of our hostels serve breakfast, which consists of bread, cornflakes yogurt and instant coffee. We are so tired of it!

We're looking forward to tomorrow, Hopefully we'll find time for another blog, but if we don't it's becasue there is so much to see here!