On the road again!!! We woke up extra early today and rushed through breakfast so we could hit the road early and get to Rome before the day gets extra hectic. We drove for a little while before stopping at a (guess what?) hill town for a quick excursion. However, all sarcasm and sleepy grumpiness aside, this was a pretty fantastic stop for us. We took a tram up the hill and walked through the square where we saw a chocolate festival going on in the main square (more on that later) towards the edge of the city walls. There we marveled at the view (never gets old) and talked about the city before heading into an old cistern.
Rather than the typical cave/tunnel that I am used to, this cistern was essentially a giant water tower that dug straight into the ground. The roof was open so the view down inside the hole was pretty awesome, and the structure was a double helix of staircases: one for going up and one for going down. We walked the whole way down to the bottom and marveled back up before dragging ourselves back up the staircase. From here we walked back through the square and through some nice streets before arriving at a pretty fantastic church. The Palm Sunday procession was going on, so we got to follow them into the church and snap some quick pictures before being shooed out since there was a real service going on.
After some observing in the piazza outside the church we walked back into the town for some lunch at the market. I got a donut (at least twice the size of ours in the USA) that had been cut in half and filled with some kind of crème, as well as some dried cherries, bananas and kiwis (which were amazing!!). After eating and some aimless wandering we rode the tram back down and set off for Roma!!! I missed the whole ride since I fell asleep (and I have a gigantic knot in my back as punishment) but once we got to the city we all woke up and looked around until we got to the hotel.
We all checked into our apartments, which are amazing!!!!! We are split up into an 8-person apartment, two 7-person apartments, and a 4 person. I am in one of the 7s, and as it turns out, the other 7-person room is joined to ours by a single door and tomorrow they will unlock it for us! The apartment is amazing, Richard and I are sharing one room (finally with a balcony!!!!) and the other 5 in our room are my good friends as well. We have a nice kitchen (way better than the closet I had in Columbus this year), laundry, two bathrooms and a main balcony off of the kitchen. We are in a pretty great area called Trastevere, which is just a few stops on the Metro (we have passes for that and the busses the whole time we are here) from the center of Rome! After getting used to our awesome new digs we set off to find some dinner. We ended up just stopping at a pretty awesome pizza place before wandering around the area for a while. 
We were able to go to an island in the Tiber River where a hospital has been for an extremely long time. There is a pretty neat area down along the edge where you can walk along the water and get great views of the river, bridges and even St. Peter’s in the distance. Aside from the crazy amount of bugs down there it was pretty amazing, and we ended up just sitting there relaxing for a while. After our walk we got back, did some blogging and went through a lot of pictures before heading to bed!
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