day one and two - so the reggio tour begins

For the record, i'm not a blogger. I thought it would be fun to possibly start a "secret" blog as my memory is slowing dying, each day i grow older. This is supposed to be purely for myself when i'm old and gray and therefore if you have the honour of being invited to read, please enjoy my memory of this beautiful place we call Europe.

i met Nat at the airport on Tuesday, November 24, 2009. The trip started with a "good-bye, see you soon" to James. We had 45 minutes (our flight was at 8:50pm) to make it through security and get to our terminal. We found our seats on the airplane and took our places for 9 hours. Luckily, the third passenger had extra long legs and asked to be moved so the next 9 hours, Nat and I shared the three seater. After two movies (Time Traveller's wife and The Ugly Truth - note, both these two movies sucked!) and a couple decent naps we arrive in Heathrow, London airport. What an amazing airport! The escalators won top prize!

we filled our tummies with a croissant (for Nat) and soup (for me), then waited for our plane to be ready to take us to Rome. We arrived in Rome and immediately started to seek a way to our hotel. Now, let me tell you, Nat and I are allergic to carrying our bags as they are extremely heavy. I swear I purposely packed the least amount of clothes as i didn't mind "recycling" my outfits - as simple as i am. But anyhow, carry my 25 (24.3 pounds to be exact!) pound suitcase and Nat's 20 pound suitcase after a long flight (even if it was a short one!) was not our ideal plan. So it began - our hunt for the cheapest way- without needing to carrying our own luggage. The first Italian man stopped us and asked if we wanted a lift to our hotel; i'm sure we were easy targets for business as our faces were so sad looking as we lugged our suitcases down the hallway from the baggage claim (it must have only been 500 metres but 500 metres too much for me!). 80 euros was his bargin price. WTF?!?! That's 80 euros too much, were we going to get a personal chaffeur as well at that price?!?! So we walked away because there's no way "these" Italians were going to take our shopping money so easily. He came back and suggested that we can go with him in his van for 40 euros instead. Even though that was still a bit pricey, we paid the price to live in comfort.
Our hotel, Twenty-One near the Vatican, was awesome! Very impressive. The room was quite large for an European room and the bathroom - wow! Of course pictures were taken and once i figure out how to post those, i will. We parked our suitcases and went back down to have our first Roman meal. Mistakenly we chose this place across the street from our hotel. It was supposed to be a pizzeria but i swear it was cardboard with misleading toppings for 30 euros!
After our meal, we called it a night.