We are finally on our way! After months of planning, shopping, as well as delaying our trip last year, we are once more headed to Iran to visit Nick’s family and homeland. It’s a long trip to Iran – generally about 25-35 hours in just travel time, so we decided to break up the trip and get some rest and relaxation before arriving in Tehran by taking a slight detour to Rome. We left Seattle around noon on Saturday and arrived in Rome via Amsterdam mid-afternoon on Sunday. The only challenge with stopping on the way is that it limits how much baggage we could take to one bag of maximum 50 pounds each, plus a carry-on. While this seems like a lot, when you consider that gift-giving is in Iran, as in many other countries, a very important part of social etiquette, 50 pounds when buying gifts for a large family is actually not really adequate. But Nick and I severely trimmed back our own personal clothing to the bare essentials – I was actually quite impressed with how little we took along personally, as we both have a tendency to over pack!
Since we only had one large bag each, we decided to take all of our baggage to our hotel in Rome with us. What we didn’t count on was that there are not escalators or elevators running at all metro stops. So after our long flight, we did end up lugging the bags up and down a couple of flights of stairs where the escalator was broken. But we eventually managed to get to our hotel just south of the Vatican. Nice place – it caters to a lot of tourist groups from Europe. We were even pleasantly surprised that we not only had our own bathroom, but that it had a deep bathtub – just what we needed after the long flight! After a quick wash-up, we decided to head out for our first evening in Rome. We hopped back on the metro to the Piazza del Popolo and walked along the Via del Corso, a shopping passage that seemed to be closed off to traffic that evening until we turned left and arrived at the Piazza Spagna and the Spanish Steps. What a great place to just relax amongst other tourists, locals, and pots upon pots of azaleas up and down the steps.
Tired, but still excited about being in Rome, we decided we just had to visit the Trevi Fountain as well, as so off we went. We not only found the fountain, which is a spectacular site lit up at night, but also discovered a great little pizzeria and gellateria near the fountain, where we naturally delighted in our first pizza and gelato in Italy!
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