Madrid & Rome Feb. 3 (Tuesday)

We check out of the hostel this morning and bought four large loaves of bread for breakfast. Then we went to the Metro and took four different lines to get to the Madrid airport; I have become a master at Metro navigation! I can’t believe how far underground some go; at one point we took four large flights of escalators down! On the first line we started talking with a man from Texas. Apparently, his father-in-law is the Vice President of Austin College! Oh my goodness, small world! Security at the airports in Europe is definitely less strict than the DFW Airport; my razor made it through and they never asked to see my boarding pass or passport until we got to the gate.
After landing in Rome we went to find customs to go through. Customs in Rome apparently only consist of a sign that says “Customs” over an automatic exit door. Absolutely no one talked to us as we exited. Customs?!? Ha! However, we were immediately bombarded with pushy taxi drivers trying to coerce us into going with them. We got train and bus directions from a tourist info person, but a different person told us there was a bus that could take us directly from the airport to the hostel for cheaper. Well, it was a crazy ride. The bus only sat 7 and there were 9 of us (me, my three friends, and five ladies from Mexico going to some hotel), so we squished. Pretty much the only English the bus driver spoke was “Obama” and “four.” He though he could speak Spanish too, but the five Mexican women with us seemed to have a difficult time understanding him too.
The hostel in Madrid seemed like a nice hotel compared to the one we are in here in Rome, although it’s still not that bad. We’re in a mixed 8 room of bunk beds and one of the other guests is a 50-something year old man! How does that happen? At least there are bathrooms with showers and a kitchen we can use, provided we find food. After checking into the hostel we went out in search of food. A lot of places were closed, but we found a Pizzaria Restaurant with pretty reasonable prices (what looked like about 4 Euro for a large slice). Well, apparently that was for an entire 14” pizza! We each ordered one and were like “holy crap!” when the waiter brought them out. But we ended up eating it all because it was very thin crust. It was only 6 Euro each for all that pizza and a bottle of carbonated water, which isn’t too bad itself. Then we continued walking and located gelato, delicious! At an Alementacion (equivalent to a US mini-mart) I got a huge bottle of water and an apple for breakfast for under 1 Euro. We will go to the Vatican tomorrow and it’s only about a 15 minute walk from the hostel.