Day one:

Our flight left at 11 on friday morning.  Since we both wanted to catch the end of the Brazil game, we decided to leave San Jose pretty early.  This turned out to be a good thing since after about a half hour in the car, we realized that we left Dori’s purse at home.  Amongst other things, the purse had her passport in it, so it was imperative that we go back to retrieve it.  We made it to the airport with no further incident around 9ish, but accidently went to the international terminal instead of the domestic terminal.  After a quick hike over to the right terminal we went through the kiosks and got our bags all checked in.  Well, almost.  We handed the guy our bags, and asked if he could mark it as being fragile (since we were bringin CA wine as gifts for the Italian Maestri).  He asked what was in them – Dori said “Fencing gear” and I said “Wine” at the same time.  Oops.  United no longer lets you check wine unless it has been professionally packed, so, we had to trek back over to the international terminal to pay $45 to get the wine boxed up and ready to  be shipped.  We kept telling ourselves how glad we were that we had left plenty of time to get to the airport, and had packed reasonable light.  There was a bit of confusion when we went to check our bags again because it appeared that we had already checked two bags.  Fortunatly we were able to get this resolved in plenty of time to make it to our gate.

Our first flight was pretty smooth.  We even langed in Chicago a little earlier which helped make the hour long layover a little easier.  I always hate having to get around at the Chicago airport, it’s huge and it takes forever to get to the other terminals.  We really didn’t have anything to worry about though – the first announcement we heard after we got on the plane was that one of the air conditioning units was broken on the plane and that it would take about an hour to fix it.  For future reference, sitting for an hour at the back of a plane with no A/C is not very fun.  Once we took off though, everything went smoothly.  I spent most of my time kind  of in a daze, switching between reading, watching tv, trying to sleep, and wishing I had one of those cool chairs in first class  reclined all the way flat.

Our arrival in Rome was pretty smooth.  The last time I went flew into Europe, it was in London, and I kept expecting to turn a corner and see this gigantic line of people waiting in line for Customs that would take 2 hours to get through.  The most we had was a 5 minute line to show somoene our passports.  When we found customs, there was a sign for people who didn’t have anything to declare, so we went to that.  As soon as we got there we realized we’d already gone through and were done.  So far, Italy is awesome!

We took at shuttle from the airport to the B&B that Dori reserved in advance for us.  Rome is kind of a strange place.  When you drive through it, you see this bizarre mixture of old buildings, new buildings, ancient architecture, and graffiti, all coexisting with each other.  We’d go down these pretty tight roads, and then all of the sudden, there’s this huge open area over on the right that has very old stuff in it.  I keep wishing that I had a better idea of what all of this stuff was.  It would be way cooler to have more of a context to appreciate all of the old stuff in.  On a side note, I wonder if anybody ever visits europe and see this really cool looking piece of architecture that looks really neat and old and they get all excited about it, but then someone tells them that it’s only like 30 years old or something and just wasn’t taken care of well.  I think that would be amusing.

The B&B Dori booked for us was the Casa Di Amy which is just a few blocks away from the train station.  The room was nice.  Simple, and small, but clean and nice.  After we got settled in, we went down to find a place to east.  The lady at the B&B suggested a place called the White Chicken.  The food was pretty good, we each ordered a pizza.  They had sparkling wine on tap, which is just kind of awesome.  We got a half liter for 7 euro, which was pretty cool.  We also got a half liter of water for 3 euro, which was less good.  I haven’t mentioned it yet, but Dori is seriously awesome.  I’ve never heard her speak in another language before, but I’m really impressed with how much she has picked up in the year since she started studying Italian.  She does all of the talking and I mostly just follow her around and watch her interact with people.  We’re pretty sure that the guy at the White Chicken tried to cheat us, but Dori would have none of that.  He told us the price (in Italian), I handed him a 50, and he gave me like 6 euro back.  Dori looked at the receipt and quickly realized that he had given us the wrong one.  He said he must have gotten the table wrong, but the fact that there was no hesitation in at all after Dori corrected him kind of made us wonder if it was on purpose.  Either way, Dori is awesome, and we only had to pay 29 euro for the meal.

After the meal we went back to the B&B and pretty much collapsed.  I left on the TV so that we could watch the Germany v Argentina game.  I was dozing on and off for most of it, but I managed to wake up each time Germany scored.  What happened to Argentina!?? The looked so good in their earlier games but the completely fell apart.  Germany’s second and third goals looked like they could pretty much ignore Argentina’s defense.

After our nap, we woke up feeling reasonably refreshed and went out for a walk and to find some food.  We’d originally intended to visit the Colesseum, but I don’t think either of us felt up to that.  We ended up wondering around a bit, got lost, figured out where we were, and then found a bar that we could watch the Spain v Paraguay game.  We got there for the second half and it turned out to be pretty exciting.  I couldn’t believe the two penalty kicks right in a row that were both saved.  I do not think that there were any Paraguay fans in the bar that with us.  That’s fine with me though, I didn’t really mind seeing Spain win.