We left Riga to embark on a journey that we thought would only last three months, and it was all the more exciting because this was only the second time we ever flew together. To think, after 5 years of long-distance dating of constantly flying to and from each other, we had only flown once together three months prior to the trip to Helsinki which set all of this in motion.
And so, we flew over Rome as we tried to make the most out of the daylight view and landed in Ciampino.
My first thing I noticed upon stepping out of the airport were the horizontal pine trees - something I had seen in the countless depictions of Rome I had to study in the textbooks of my early years. I went to a Catholic school of the Augustinian order, which basically forced us to study and sing about St. Augustine over and over again through 11 years of education, and here were the pine trees that curiously grew horizontally that I always thought looked rather odd.
Our first impression as the airport bus strolled through Rome was not great, to say the least. It was a mix of ooh's and aah's from seeing ancient structures all around the city, and the sharp alarm of passing through Termini. It's fair to say all main train station hubs around Europe are not the friendliest places to be, but this one was surprisingly alarming.
And so, we arrived at our accommodation in Cipro with mixed emotions.
Rome, obviously, was very different from the customs in the northern side of Europe we're more accustomed to. Cars zipped by in small streets, no one stopped for pedestrians to cross, there was rubbish bins everywhere, and all the buildings seemed old, tired, and tattered. Alice was in a state of panic and was worried that we were in a sketchy neighbourhood. In hindsight, of course, this was probably one of the safest neighbourhoods to be, since it was right behind the Vatican walls.
We quickly visited a supermarket in the area, which was also rather disappointing, and and headed into our accommodation after a brisk walk around the block. At this point, we were beginning to wonder if we had made the right choices - in terms of choosing the accommodation and committing ourselves to 3 months of travelling like this.
