The Eye of Patrick

Hello Everyone,

After my time in Tokyo I flew to Europe to meet my family. Europe? Why Europe, when you are Canadian? Well that is an interesting question. My family is from Canada originally, but we moved to Brazil and now my brother studies in England. So when it came to organizing a family vacation that would be easy for all of us to get to we selected Europe as it is kind of in the middle for all of us. Then we decided to start our trip of in Italy, and that is where my journal post will continue.

We landed in Rome airport and try to make our way to our hotel. I failing to write down the hotel and the cabs not really caring where they dropped us off meant that we were slightly stranded in the train terminal area of Rome. This would not have been a bad thing had any of us spoken Italian, but we hadn’t. So we went searching for our hotel, simply on the name that we had in our heads. We went from hotel to hotel asking if they knew our hotel, some would say they did and point us in one direction and we would walk there to find out it wasn’t our hotel. But after about 30 minutes to an hour we located our hotel and started our European vacation.

Over the course of 3 nights and 4 days we explored the touristy areas of Rome, from the coliseum to the forum and back. Our hotel was fairly well located so we were able to walk to all the major tourist sites in Rome.

I didn’t really like Rome, as I felt it was dirty and unfriendly town and everyone seemed to want to rip us off or did not care to help us. This could have been because I had just came from Japan where people are polite even if they don’t want to be. But when we left Rome to catch our train to Florence I was happy to leave.

But do not worry, though my trip started off on the wrong foot, everything after Rome I enjoyed greatly and look forward to sharing in further posts.