Oh The Places You Will Go: Meet Me In St. Peter's Square

I’m not a spontaneous person.

So when I called my boyfriend at midnight in early January and confirmed my spring break plans, he was more than a bit surprised. My mouse hovered over the “Buy” button on a roundtrip ticket matching not only the exact dates of my spring break, but also priced at half the cost of a normal ticket to the eternal city. I was going to Rome.

A little bit of background and some catching up to speed. As mentioned in my previous blog post, I continued the summer working for my start up technology firm, “commuting” every few weeks between Seattle and San Francisco. After a busy summer of airports and hotels, I left early to get back to school in Chicago where I led a freshman backpacking retreat.

In traditional rom-com fashion, a series of odd and serendipitous events led to no tent, one tarp, two facilitators, and the worst mosquito and black fly season ever seen in Pictured Rocks Michigan. Nothing bonds like no sleep, bugs, and having to work together. The trip overall was a huge success, and after having spent 10 straight days together, my co-facilitator/eventual boyfriend and I were both surprised to find that we actually wanted to keep hanging out.

Montage of romantic moments over the semester, dates, and a trip to California to hike Yosemite, Big Sur, and the Pinnacles all in one week, and then there I was hovering over the “Buy” button because he was studying in Rome for the semester, and honestly why not?

Rome for five days, Florence for two, and all I can say is wow.

It’s impossible to describe Rome. My biggest problem was forcing myself to get any sleep. Up early and out late, we must have walked 10 miles a day, or at least that’s what my feet told me. We hit all the major sites, and even had time to wander and get lost on the side streets, the places away from the throngs of tourists.

We had a few rules:

1. Enter every church you pass. We were never disappointed. However, this did change our time plans a bit, because a walk that should take 10 minutes took us an hour as the four churches we passed along the way needed some admiration

2. Find the best gelato in the city. Rank by category (atmosphere, price, size, quality). Use dark chocolate gelato as the standardization tool. For anyone who is interested I have a comprehensive list J

3. Talk to the old people. Old Italians loved us. On more than one occasion the table next to us was of older couples, and regardless of frequent language differences they always tried to strike up conversation, and we sometimes even got our dinner paid for in full

I’ll now let the pictures do some of the talking….