Saturday, August 25, 2007

Getting to Rome


We went to Rome after Venice. We had to take a really long train ride to get there--almost 5 hours. But, near the end, bad luck came our way. We had an hour and a half left, and we were on another one of those really cool Eurostar trains--the kind that that are smooth, quiet, fast, and shoot through the tunnels at high speed. But then, right in the middle of the track, we stopped for a loooooooong time. The train driver made an announcement in Italian. My mom, who, as you already know, speaks Italian, told us what the driver said. All he had said was that the train was experiencing technical difficulties and that we would probably be back moving in a few minutes. Well, marooned on that one spot, those few minutes stretched into nearly 45 minutes. Finally when we started moving again, the train driver made another announcement, a lot longer than the first, and when he was done my mom told us what had happened. The driver had said that this train wasn’t going to make it to Rome, so at the next station we would have to get off this train with all our luggage and switch to a different train. Only one word describes that train most correctly: horrible. Absolutely horrible. It was stuffy, crowded, and when the train was in motion it made a lot of noise. One more thing. I like fast trains, the faster the better. This train was really fast and accelerated quickly too. That was fine with me except for one small detail. Whenever the train went through a tunnel at high speed (which, with our luck, happened very often on this trip) your ears would get really pressurized, without popping, so you had to pop them yourself, which happened to be a lot harder than it sounds. To do that, you had to try to yawn, which is also really hard. And after you yawned your ears would become really pressurized again, and yawning would take a while to do afterward.

But enough descriptions. When we got to the Rome train station we took a subway (yes, Rome has subways) to the station nearest to our apartment. Actually, it was kind of a long walk away, but when we got there our walk was awarded. There was an elegant lobby with our key ready and waiting for us. We took the elevator up to the fifth floor (which, by the way, was the highest floor) and went into our apartment, number A22. It was a lot better than the one in Venice. It had a nice hallway, with a bathroom immediately to your left and a kitchen/sitting room that was about five times bigger than the kitchen in Venice. It had three bedrooms. One had a small bed; one had two single beds that could be moved together to make a double; (by the way, that was the room I was sharing with Anthony) and a room with a king sized bed and a little couch-bed. We got settled in, and then we went out and found a place to eat. Then we came back and went to bed.

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hi Thomas

thought i'd leave a comment since no one else had. See you at school,

blah

October 17, 2007 5:00 PM  

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