Ciao!

I'M IN ROME!!!!! Wow, where to begin! It's only day two and I've already done so much! I guess I'll begin with the flight over. I woke up bright and early Friday morning (at 4:30am) and was at the airport by 6am only to find out that my 7:45 departure was delayed to 8:45. I could have slept an extra hour. Oh well, I was too excited anyways. We landed in Charlotte, NC by about 11am and then waited...and waited...and waited. We had a 7 hour layover, but luckily for 2 of those hours the Spain/Chile soccer game was on. We figured that since we'll be living in Spain for a month we should probably start cheering for them. Even with the game on, it still seemed like a lifetime. But boarding time eventually came and off we were to Rome, Italy! We sat in the middle section, so not only were the seats small and not that comfortable, but we were also crammed. At least Courtney, Chrissy, and I were all sitting together. That would have been really awkward if we weren't. Since the flight left at 6:15pm, we were quickly served dinner which consisted of chicken with rice and broccoli, a mini salad, a roll, and a brownie that was to die for!! I was pretty impressed! We also had our own personal TVs with movies to choose from. Naturally, I was cheesy and watched When In Rome. It was really cute and fit the occasion perfectly! Then, promptly after the movie was over I popped my dramamine to knock me out. It sort of worked. It made me super drowsy, as usual, and would have completely knocked me out, but did I mention how incredibly hard it is so sleep while sitting up and in cramped chair? Although, I think I slept more than I thought because morning seemed to come pretty quickly and before I knew it, I was in Rome! It was SO sureal! We rode the train from the airport to our hotel, but it still didn't seem real. I wasn't really in Rome, the actual Rome, Italy. We quickly showered and changed into cute, not slept in clothes and hit the town!

Our hotel is only a block from the train station and only a ten minute walk to the Colosseum! Convenient, right?! Yes, it's so awesome! The first thing we did was hop on the train, and two short stops later we were are the Colosseum! The ACTUAL Colosseum! (yes, we rode the train instead of walked because we were too lazy and tired.) Right when we walked out of the train station this is what we saw:
What a dramatic and amazing way to enter Rome! This is when it became real to me. I was really in Rome! Immediately, being the awesome tourists that we are, we began taking pictures left and right! We crossed the street to get a closer look and to see how we could go about entering the Colosseum. However, there was an extremely long line just to get tickets to get in. Luckily, a Canadian lady standing outside the Colosseum told us that a tour was about to leave to skip and line and go right in. It was only 20 euros to get a 45 minute tour of the Colosseum AND a 45 minute tour of Palatine Hill. Good deal, right?! Yep, we took it and in we went!! Our tour guide was Italian, actually he was Roman as he said and was very proud to be a Roman. So much so that the tour itself wasn't so great. He was very strange and sarcastic and didn't really tell us a lot of new information. However, we did have an hour to roam around the place before our next tour started, so that was nice.Here are two pictures of the inside of the Colosseum. So cool!! The bottom one, left to right is: Courtney, Chrissy, and ME! After checking out the Colosseum, it was time for our next tour. However, right when we gathered together huge, dark clouds rolled in, the wind picked up, the temperature dropped, lightening started flashing, and thunder started rumbling. "Oh no, we're absolutely going to get poured on," we all thought. And that we did. But the tour went on! It was still a great tour despite the rain. The Palatine Hill was so interesting, and we had a great tour guide! He was Scottish and funny and was super interesting. So even though we got soaked it was well worth it. And, of course right when our tour ended it stopped raining.

After site seeing, we went back to our hotel and found a place to eat dinner. I had pizza and it was delicious!! Actually, I had the delicious pizza at lunch (sorry, i forgot about lunch), and had 4 cheese pasta for dinner. Oh - my - goodness! It was to die for! Then, we went back to our hotel and crashed! We were so tired!!

Ok, so all of that was yesterday. Now, I'm going to talk about today. But I'll do it in another post to break it up. Hope I'm not boring you!