All roads lead to Roman travel agents

Today is my turn to write some of the blog. I know I am not as funny as Steve, so apologies for the lack of entertainment, but I will try - or Steve sitting beside me may add in.....

So next we had a very early start 5.30am (reminisent of getting up for the gym before work) to catch a flight to Rome. We arrived in Rome shortly after 10am which left us plenty of time to find our new cubbyhole for the next few nights and to arrange some of the mundane things like accomodation for the next week or so and activities ....

The room we had the first two nights at this hostel was just that - a cubbyhole. If I held a cat in my hand, I wouldn't be able to swing a full circle, but hey it gave us a clean place to rest our heads - with our own bathroom (yeah!). The location was very dodgey but just two streets over we left Chinatown and Little India and came upon a really nice part of town.

Our first mission was to try to arrange to get to Pompeii - something Steve has always been interested to see.... so we walk around the streets to find a travel agent. One thing we have found on this trip, when you are looking for something, whether it be a supermarket, laundromat, kebab shop or travel agent, you can never find one, but the minute you no longer need it, well there they all are!!!!! Boy could I go on about the amount of walking we have done in search of.... but not now.....

As I was saying, we were looking for a travel agent and did come across one. As we walked into the store, or should I say as we were trying to walk in, we were literally pushed out the door by who we presume was the owner. It was lunch/siesta time - of course we are back in Italy - of course there is a two or so hour gap where everything shuts..... might I just add that we have been in Europe for some time and we both may just decide we need to adopt this new lifestyle at work when we get back :-)

Eventually we did return and buy tickets to Pompeii leaving early the next morning. So tickets to Pompeii sorted, we then needed to find accommodation for the final two nights in Rome (we had only booked two nights). We then spent another two hours looking for a particular tourist office we had been (poorly) directed to and eventually found a very helpful person who operates a last minute accommodation type stall. Very hard to find accommodation for the weekend, because President Bush was in town!!! More about that later!!!! So we ended up staying at the hostel we booked but just needed to move our rooms every night - not so bad an inconvenience since the owners were a lovely couple who shifted our bags for us. Marco even replaced a beer that was stolen from the community fridge with three because he felt bad that someone would do such a thing. He told us he had a good idea who it was and had words with them.

It was nice to be back in Rome and was looking forward to seeing all the sites with Steve but for now I'll sign this off and more of that after Pompeii.

Lina and Steve