{"id":6680,"date":"2016-11-23T09:28:43","date_gmt":"2016-11-23T14:28:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/social.rollins.edu\/wpsites\/letters\/?p=6680"},"modified":"2019-07-17T17:44:55","modified_gmt":"2019-07-17T17:44:55","slug":"weekends-to-travel-europe-or-roam-around-rome","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.rollins.edu\/letters\/2016\/11\/23\/weekends-to-travel-europe-or-roam-around-rome\/","title":{"rendered":"Weekends: To Travel Europe or Roam around Rome?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ciao Regazzi,<\/p>\n

It’s been a few weeks since I’ve last posted, 5 classes and travelling on weekends has me swamped. but I’m back and have the\u00a0week leading up to Thanksgiving with little to no homework and a lot of free time to relax:)<\/p>\n

Weekend trips or staying in Rome is one of the harder decisions you\u00a0will face. The best advice? Spend\u00a01\/2 your weekends of the semester in Rome and 1\/2\u00a0the weekends taking full advantage of the cheap travel and hostel life. Maybe even save a weekend or two for some impromptu travel with your new friends abroad. Here’s some tips on how to maximize your weekends away, and your weekends in Roma:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Popular European Cities? Book those trips ahead of your semester. You can save hundreds of dollars that way and won’t feel stressed about planning trips while trying to do homework and enjoy Rome<\/li>\n
  2. Less popular European cities? Save those for the impromptu weekend trips with friends as the prices of flights and hostels won’t change much (as long as you still book at least 2 weeks before hand, after that expect price hikes).<\/li>\n
  3. Rome is huge. About 2hrs from one side of the city to the other on public transit but, this means there is a whole lot to discover! Look up the less common things to do in Rome, visit the city parks, explore different areas of Rome at different times of day\/night…often they can be completely different scenes! For example: Campo d’Fiori is a huge and amazing open air market by day, and a big social gathering for drinks and college students by night<\/li>\n
  4. Don’t rely on a plan! It is ok to have a set destination and schedule,\u00a0 but some of the best experiences I have had is\u00a0when we\u00a0randomly decided to go into a restaurant that we’ve\u00a0never heard of before or the time we\u00a0got lost in the city and ended up discovering some beautiful ivy covered alleys and\u00a0ruins without a bunch of tourists.<\/li>\n
  5. Be a little selfish. Your friends might be planning some great exciting trip to Prague or Oktoberfest, but if it isn’t your scene than don’t feel obligated to go for the fear of missing out. Instead treat yourself with some friends staying in Rome. Go splurge on dinner, wine, and gelato. Go wander around Rome during the day by yourself and just take it all in. You have a weekend open but your friends just want to lay around? Book a ticket to another city by yourself. I’ve made some great friends in hostels and ended up having a wonderful time with a group of people in Barcelona when I decided to go out on my own.<\/li>\n
  6. Lastly, there are some great festivals\/celebrations and even concerts in Rome and Italy. Look up what’s happening around you, even in the smaller cities. Sometimes there’s a wine festival where the cities water fountains spout wine instead of water and it’s an all you can appreciate time of tasting wine (true story), or it’s the big Euro Chocolate Festival where endless amounts of chocolate are given practically for free. Look em up and take some day trips to experience the good vibes:)<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Here are two of my favorite experiences thus far:<\/p>\n

    \"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

    Paris. The City of Love. This place was wonderful, colder than Rome but it was refreshing. I had Chipotle which made my whole weekend (Rome doesn’t have much food variety outside of Italian), and ate many many macaroons. Seeing the Eiffel Tower was great even though it was not what I had expected. What made it so great was that we walked. Walked everywhere to do everything which opened our eyes to so many small parts and neighborhoods of Paris. Also the public transit was seamless and always on time, which was miraculous compared to Rome.<\/p>\n

    \"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

    This photo was taken around 5:30-6am. 4\u00a0friends and I had gotten a late dinner that ended around midnight (dinners here last 2-4 hours), we went to a bar to meet up with classmates, then 6 of us had panini’s in Piazza Venezia around 2am where we met a group of Irish travellers and spent about an hour and 1\/2 debating Hillary vs Clinton (this night was before the election happened). We then decided to go to the Coliseum, which is beautiful at night, and that led us to an mindset of exploration where we said\u00a0“Hey, the Trevi should be close by, Let’s go there too!”….well we ended up getting lost for 2 hours and we really got to know each other (and parts of the city). Ultimately we found the Trevi around 5:30am, and we were the only ones there (aside from the 2 police guarding it). It was beautiful to spend a bit taking the fountain in and relaxing with the friends I’ve only just gotten close too:) Finally, I went to bed around 7am but it was one of the most amazing and unplanned nights I’ve ever had in Rome.<\/p>\n

    Ciao Ciao,<\/p>\n

    Marc<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Ciao Regazzi, It’s been a few weeks since I’ve last posted, 5 classes and travelling on weekends has me swamped. but I’m back and have the\u00a0week leading up to Thanksgiving with little to no homework and a lot of free time to relax:) Weekend trips or staying in Rome is one of the harder decisions…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":338,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6680","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-isarome"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rollins.edu\/letters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6680","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rollins.edu\/letters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rollins.edu\/letters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rollins.edu\/letters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/338"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rollins.edu\/letters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6680"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rollins.edu\/letters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6680\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15779,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rollins.edu\/letters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6680\/revisions\/15779"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rollins.edu\/letters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6680"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rollins.edu\/letters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6680"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rollins.edu\/letters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6680"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}