As I mentioned in my previous post, the thing to do in Rome on the weekend is, well, leave Rome. Ok, this is somewhat of an exaggeration, but travel is a popular past time here. In February (for those of you who aren’t keeping up, not that I blame you, yes I know I’m posting this in May, I’m very behind….must have been all that traveling–ha! Tie-in!), I did a lot of traveling.
My entire apartment (all 6 of us) decided to make a day trip to a town just outside of Rome called Tivoli. One of the must see sights of Tivoli (besides Emperor Hadrian’s palace, which I have not seen yet, but shall tomorrow!) is Villa d’Este.
Ok, history time! (Yeah I know, but I’m a history major/nerd so bear with me) So, the family that owned Villa d’Este claimed to be descendants of Hercules (yeah, THE Hercules) and so inside of the villa (big house) you get a lot of frescoes depicting Hercules. Now while I found this really cool, you all (like my roommates) are probably more interested in what draws most people to Villa d’Este: the beautiful gardens. Villa d’Este’s gardens are like something out of a fairy tale. They inspire dreams of gentry strolling through the lantern-lit paths in fancy gowns and soft music wafting through the air.
Tivoli was comparatively quite close to home. During February I also made my farthest trek from Rome: Brussels. Brussels was….well it was an adventure. To start with we learned an valuable lesson: always double check what airport you’re flying out of, especially if you’re running late. See, Rome has 2 airports: Ciampino (CIA) and Fiumicino (FCO). Well, we thought we were flying out of CIA, but as we learned upon arrival, our flight actually left from FCO. After our 2nd taxi ride of the morning (did I mention the flight left at 6:30 AM??), we arrived at the (correct) airport around 5:50 to find that the check-in desk closed 40 minutes prior to departure. Well, this meant that we couldn’t print our boarding passes. After some begging and explaining our predicament in English and broken Italian to Security, they kindly decided to let us through. At which point we were stuck behind the SLOWEST family to ever go through security. We got through and ran to the gate, carrying our shoes and holding up our belt-less pants.
Once we arrived at the gate, of course boarding had been completed and the woman at the gate was less than impressed with our situation. After several minutes speaking with someone over the phone, she begrudgingly printed our boarding tickets and allowed us onto the plane. 6:12 AM. We were in our seats, the sealed the door within the minute, and we were off to Belgium!
Belgium was a whirlwind of Gothic architecture, rain, an attempted/failed terrorist on the metro, chocolate, and being locked out of our Airbnb. All in all, it could have gone better, but it also could have gone worse! Actually, Brussels was pretty cool, and small enough that we got to see just about everything in a weekend (except the statue of the peeing boy…maybe one day!).
But of course, a trip to Belgium would not have been complete without….WAFFLES!!!!
