ROMA UPDATES

sorry i havent posted in a while! ive been gone,

but here are my previous writings while i was away

on my italy trip....

now its off to rome! we were supposed to leave at

7:30 tonite, after i woke up from my day-long

nap..but moritz never showed up on time. by the

time he got to school (10:30 pm) i kind of knew

what happened. basically his car got towed a week

before but he didnt know, so he had to go search

and rescue his little car that we were supposed to

drive to rome. haha. sucks though, cause it cost

him 340 euros and he stepped in dog crap on the way

over there. not a good start to the night! so we

finally left at like 11 pm...pavel, moritz and I (a

russan from moscow who is hilarious, and german

from achen who appears to be on energy pills

constantly, and an american from LA who doesnt know

anything about driving thru europe at

night....amazing). and i was the first driver!

driving a stick shift little car from vienna to

rome is awesome! i had never drove in europe

before, so this was gonna be sweet.

and it was, but also a long long night. i drove

till 6 in the morning to bologna, italy while

listening to techno the entire time. we passed thru

some of the alps, and went thru a lot of tunnels.

couldn't see much though, as it was obviously dark.

moritz loves techno. after that i passed out for a

few hours, and then all of a sudden we were near

rome. the sun was shining and the wineries

surrounding us were amazing. it was like a whole

different world.

found our way to the hostel quickly before heading

off to the vatican. its wierd being here all of a

sudden. i mean, you can drive 10 hours in

california and still be in california. and thats

just a state. crazy. anyways...found our crappy

hostel (but what can you expect, right) and got a

room that smelled like pee consistently. it was

great! the italian lady there seemed as if she was

mexican and basically her entire extended family

was living there. so strange. but whatever we don't

care about that. gotta meet everyone at the

VATICAN. boom.

oh ya, and i must also say that we didnt anticipate

the cost of certain things in terms of driving a

car thru europe. as amazing as it is, these

countries don't like drving very much. they seems

to discourage it with their stupid highway tolls.

we paid 42 euros for 10 hours of driving, just to

be present on the highway. stuuuupid. and then, of

course, we realized that we can't just park our car

anywhere. we have to pay for that too. so

everywhere we went, we were paying like 20 euros

per day. not much when you split it, but it all

adds up in the end. whaaatever.