Ahhh, Rome...

What a great trip.

The whole point of being here is to be able to live in a foreign
country, make a enough money to only go broke slowly, and travel as
much as we can.

Well, Rome was high on our list. Many thanks go to Nicci to pushing to
get it planned and executed. Surprisingly, she is more organized and
stuff than me...

Public transport is great in Europe, and there are metros, buses,
taxi's, planes, trains and automobiles available. I've seen rickshaws,
big red tourist buses and horse drawn carriages (Which always remind
me of Kate and Tori).

Europeans have their own way of doing things, and one thing they seem
to like to do, is have weird schedules and do odd things at odd (to
us) times.

Case in Point:

We fly in to Rome after working in Madrid all day. We land about 9:45,
collect our bags and aim for the metro. There is a train from the the
Frampachino (not the real name, but something like that) to downtown
Rome, (the Termini station). Rome is a bit inland, and the train takes
about 40 minutes. We were lucky as we got to the train near the
airport just as it was about to leave. Yay! 22€ later, we were
onboard and waiting to get to Termini.

We get there, and are in your typical huge, center city, train, bus,
metro station.

We aim for the metro, of which there are two lines (A and B)
http://www.rome.info/metro/

Our hotel is on line A, down by porta
furba (out of center down, but right on the line, so still good).

Compare this to Madrid's metro:
http://subway.umka.org/maps/madrid.gif

Ok, back to the topic.:

Rome CLOSED their metro at 10pm, to continue building line C ;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rome_Metro

GRR!!

So, we are in rome, with bags, at night and hungry. There are buses
(we find out later), but my italian is very poor, and I end up punting
and paying a cabbie to drive us down there. He was nice, and stopped
speaking italian to us once he realized that we were american.

Anywho, that first night was a bit of a trial for my need to have all
our trips go perfectly, but hey, in the end it worked out fine.

Lesson learned.