Day 13 - Don't go until its green

Today we said goodbye to Manarola and hello to Rome. After an uneventful train ride and an uneventful metro ride (save the relative excitement of finding a functioning machine to buy tickets), we arrived at our awesomely spacious apartment. Our host showed us around and boy, does she stock the place well. For example, this is the first place to understand that conditioner should be considered an essential.

After exploring our new place with glee, we decided to go explore the city a bit. We decided on the Pantheon as our destination and picked the stop near the Trevi fountain so we could see it on the way. We were perplexed and rather disappointed when exiting the station and seeing a nice, but dinky and unimpressive fountain in the plaza. Google maps saved the day when it named the fountain the Triton fountain and showed us the place we actually wanted to be.

The Trevi fountain is pretty cool (though still falling short of the Neptune fountain in Schonbrunn). The Pantheon was cooler still, especially since no one in the group actually knew what the inside looked like. After failing multiple times to capture its magnificence in digital form, we explored a bit, pulled up the Wikipedia article on it to determine how long it had been a temple and how long it had been a church (about 300 and 1500 years respectively), then went in search of gelato.

After procuring said gelato, we took an impromptu poll to figure out the favorite flavor so far. The answers were the Creamy Venetian from the day we left Venice, the Fig and Walnut from Susu (the only place in Venice we ever went that was actually recommended to us), and the Stracciatella from Susu. Creamy Venetian got three votes. Because it was the best.

Then we got groceries for breakfast and dropped them off at our apartment, found that this short errand cost us dinner at the place we wanted (we think they were closing so they wouldn't seat us or they were busy for the next half hour so wouldn't seat us), so we ate dinner at the place right next door to our apartment building. It was some sort of wrap place. The food was pretty good and quite filling.