It's about 3 am at the Cairo International Airport when we check in and get our boarding passes all the way to Amsterdam. We were told only hours before that flights were cancelled there, so I was pretty excited to have a ticket in my hand, and a quote from the guy at the desk "Only flights to UK and Belgium and France." That was hope to hold on to.
We landed in Rome at about 8 am, and the mission was back to normal: 5 hours to see Rome. GO!!
Just like every other famous historical monument I've visited in the last four months, I walked up the stairs out of the metro and the Colosseum towered before me as if it was totally normal to have 2000 year old Roman ruins in the middle of any city.
The first thing we did was go to an internet cafe (where I dropped my camera and broke my lens filter) and check if our flight was actually flying. Everything we looked at seemed to indicate our flight was good to go.
Ruins and ruins and more ruins. We saw a lot of ruins, and it was very interesting to know that this was the heart of one of the greatest, most extensive empires in history. The ruins were everywhere.
This fountain was the last thing we saw before we had to head back to the plane station, our 5 hours were up, and we'd seen a good amount of history. We were getting pressed for time to catch the train back to the plane station though, so we had to hurry.
Goal 41: Follow advice from a stranger.
We purchased some authentic Italian pizza outside of this fountain, and we were getting ready to run to the next metro station. We asked the lady who sold us the pizza where it is, but she said it would be much better if we just took a bus, because most of the busses go directly to Termini, where we want to be. So, we followed that advice, and quickly found the bus stop. However, the busses were many and the signs confusing. We constantly ran up and down the road to look at all of the route signs, and missed one of the busses we needed to get on. Eventually we got on a line that went directly to Termini station.
However, if you've ever tried to ride in a bus in downtown Rome, you might know that tourists are everywhere, and it's likely that you can walk down the street faster. The bus continually stopped and slowed down, and we barely made it 100 meters in five minutes. We decided that we should get off the bus when it got near the Colosseum metro, and take the metro the rest of the way.
Well, as we waited for the metro, I noticed there was a coin purse on the tracks. I was thinking someone who was afraid of getting splattered all over the station might have dropped it and left it there, possibly full. So I quickly hopped down and back up with the purse, spending nearly an entire tenth of a second on the whole process. Empty. I threw the purse back down onto the tracks, and about two minutes later I was accosted by a metro attendant who kicked us out of the metro station, and told us we could take the bus... We ended up getting a taxi directly to the airport because we were so tight for time, and our plane was going to leave... or at least that's what we thought.
Goal 88: Experience something that I never would have expected.
We go to check in for our flight and that's when they finally break the bad news: "This flight is cancelled, Amsterdam Schipol is closed." However, shortly after that, they broke the good news about having a hotel with dinner and breakfast, and we would rebook our flight for the next morning. We would surely be missing our train from Amsterdam, so we decided to rebook for Frankfurt, Germany, in hopes that we could get to Copenhagen before our train to Västerås leaves.
It would turn out natural disasters are a little more serious than everyone thought, and every day we would rebook a ticket for somewhere as north as we could get, and everyday they would tell us the flights were still cancelled.
My travel plans were affected by a volcano in Iceland...
Well this is where everything changes. Our free night of hotel didn't have free internet, and we found out on the second day that we only get one free night. We had no way of sending out couch requests, no way of looking up information on our situation (such as train ticket refunds and trains from Rome), and no way of letting anyone know we were stuck in Rome.
I spent about half of my time in Rome waiting at this airport.
So the rest of this story I'm going to shorten in interest of keeping your interest.- Used my friend, Elis (Previously Italy) to get free McDonalds internet, because you have to have an Italian phone number.
- Rebooked for Frankfurt. The next day rebooked to Prague. Then, rebooked for two days later for Prague so we wouldn't have to wait in line again on the next day.
- Snuck into the hotel basement where there were empty conference rooms that we slept in. (No couches available and no money for hostels lead to desperate measures)
- Found an Italian coffee shop with actual free internet, made friends with the owners, and we were able to get business done by going here every morning and night.
- Saw Rome and the Vatican during Romes free museum week (what luck!).
The Pantheon
Rome Skyline
Some Castle we got into for free
Some gorgeous church (there are thousands, if not millions of these in Rome)
I swam in the Mediterranean (Two Seas in one Trip!)
I went to mass and confession at the Vatican, and fulfilled all the requirements to get a Plenary Indulgence. That was as spectacular as the altar in St. Peter's Basilica.
The Sistine Chape
The inside of the Colosseum
The Vatican
More Vatican
These were the Andersens. They were a father-daughter crew stuck in Rome from Spain. They decided they should get demolished and go out into the streets and hang out with hobos. We talked with them for a while, and it was hilarious. The father is worth millions of dollars, and whenever someone would walk by he would yell "Visa, mastercard, american express, pesos!?"
So after five hours of Rome turned into five days, we had seen most of Rome, and were more than ready to leave. We had missed both trains now, not to mention our week of classes. It was to the point where we wanted to fly anywhere, or else start hitchhiking and/or taking trains to leave.
We were in an interesting situation because we had another trip planned to Ireland and Berlin which was now being overlapped. Because we already missed classes, our goal was to get to Berlin by any means possible to see Noah and the Whale (which we had already purchased tickets for), and then get from Berlin to home by any means possible, hopefully by air with the plane tickets we had purchased weeks ago for the Berlin trip.
After looking at how the volcano was still exploding, we decided to cut our losses, and just get a ticket to Milan, stay with Elis one night, and then start hitchhiking north. I spoke to a man who said that they might have a flight to Amsterdam, and to talk to him an hour later. I decided to wait in the rebooking line just in case, and when we got to the front with the man no where to be seen, we rebooked to Milan.
I saw him again moments before we checked into our flight to Milan, and he had us wait for a little longer because he didn't know if the flight was going to be allowed to fly or not. Well, it was granted permission minutes later, and he printed us boarding passes to get on standby to Amsterdam! We would be flying to our original destination...just five long days late. It was time to get our travels back on track, time to start making progress again... We just had to figure out what we were going to do in Amsterdam, and how we were going to get to Berlin.
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