Babies mit Bearden

10:42 PM >> EURO2007 >> Wednesday, April 4

Day 4, or "My Face on a Train"
Rome, IT; Florence, IT

So I am starting this post with a lie. This photo is from dinner on Night 3. You got to pick out your own fish to eat, although we had to endure almost becoming fiery wreckage as our taxi sped through the rain-swept night. This was the only night it rained on us in Rome, and it was amazing how we heard ambulance sirens like every three minutes. So anyway, our waiter was a great Italian guy with an Italian name who kept saying, "Yes yes, Atlantic City!" when we'd ask if he'd heard of Atlanta. He even gave us his phone number so we could meet up if we ever came back to Rome. Europeans were always handing out their contact info and inviting us to stay with them. (Must've been the Wifey's charisma.)

OK, on to Day 4 FOR REAL THIS TIME. M and I journeyed to the Colosseum. There were all these people outside the Big C hawking English-speaking tours. At first we avoided this because, c'mon, you always avoid crap like that. But then we found that the cost of the tour was like 3 Euros more than regular entry, plus you got to skip the half-hour-long line. The best part was that our guide spoke English with an accent, and she kept describing how the trap doors in the Big C's floor would "sadly open." But what she really was saying was "suddenly open".

So as our tour of the Big C ended, we found out that we could also take a guided tour of the Palatine Hill and Roman Forum for no extra cost. That made this a super-sweet deal and almost made up for the fact that the Colosseum tour basically said that everything I had told Meredith the night before about the Big C--which I had learned about in Latin class in high school--was either disproved since then, misremembered by me, or just flat-out wrong.

M got so tough as we went through the Medium F. This was helpful later because when we took the train to Florence, it totally sucked A. We had seriously over packed, and our big suitcase wouldn't fit in the overhead bin. On top of that we couldn't find the train until 2 minutes before it took off, so we were sweaty and stressed and the areas between cars that could hold big luggage were all filled. Plus we didn't really know how to read our tickets, so by sheer luck we found our car, but then we didn't realize there were assigned seats, so we sat in someone else's seats and had to move and had to carry to big-A suitcase and plop it into another seat next to our assigned seats without being able to ask the person it was next to since we were in a foreign country.

Finally we got to Firenze. This is the front door to our hotel there and then the view out of our window. We knew we'd be safe since we could jump out and land right in a hospital.