Rome - July 1-2, 2002

July 1, 2002 - Rome

After returning from Venice, I only had two days in Rome before heading out to Barcelona over July 4th weekend. As an American school, we had no classes on Thursday July 4 or Friday July 5. So I planned to spend a long weekend in Barcelona and try to get up to Pamplona for the running of the bulls, which started on Sunday morning July 7.

One would think, if one were not in Italy, that one could make reservations for a train to Pamplona over the Internet or at a local train station. I tried both of these things without any success. In order to make reservations over the Internet I needed to get the tickets sent somewhere, and I could not rely on the Italian post office to deliver anything to me. I tried going to the Italian train station but that was absolutely useless. The person at the ticket window, after I stood in line for an hour to speak to him, said that they do not sell tickets for other train stations at the International window. It was unclear exactly what they did sell there, but that is another rant.

So I decided to try to do something once I arrived in Barcelona, on the theory that anyone not from Italy had to be more helpful, even if they could not do anything, then an Italian. I was getting a little tired of being in Italy at this point. People were generally nice, and things were generally OK, but man, try to get something, anything, done and you might as well just save yourself the effort.

In addition to spending time at the train station, I saw a couple of fountains, the bee fountain (top left) and the turtle fountain (top right), as well as stopping back to Trevi Fountain (right) and the Spanish Steps (above left). I also found my way back to the Piazza Navona.

One of my roommates was going with me to Barcelona. He spoke fluent Spanish and also had the address of a rental apartment, which was supposed to be reasonably priced. We took a train to the airport after class on Wednesday and caught an afternoon flight to Barcelona.

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