DATELINE: Tirana, Albania

Author: Andy

Today was a fairly classic three-countries-in-one-day sort of day.I woke up as my flight arrived in Rome. I met Natalie over by left luggage, where we proceeded to leave luggage and we took the train into town. By the time we got into Rome's central station ("Termini") it was about 1pm and we figured we'd have roughly four hours for tourism before heading back to the airport. When I realized there were about 250 people in line ahead of us to get into the Colosseum, I bailed to go see the Forum and Vatican. Natalie had been to those before, but had never been inside the Colosseum, so it worked out best to just meet back at the airport later in the day. I did a lap around the Colosseum and made a genuine effort to get inside the Forum, but couldn't find the entrance. It was already just about 3pm, so I grabbed the Metro back over to the Vatican on the other side of town. While wandering around St. Peter's Sq taking pictures I turned around and saw Nick walking along having just exited the Basilica. I ran over and jumped him from behind, then took some more pictures before going inside St. Peter's. As a Cathedral, it was pretty impressive, although I think Notre Dame is better looking. The cool thing at St. Peter's though is that they have about three embalmed pope's on display in glass cases. At one point I recall turning around and saying "Oh hey I found another dead pope, come over here!" Unfortunately the underground tomb of all the other popes (as Sam aptly termed it, the "Pope Cellar") was closed today. Nick and I headed back to the train station and then back to the airport where we met up with Natalie who was already on line for the Tirana flight. One of her first remarks, regarding the other passengers on line was "wow, these people look so Albanian. I mean, I didn't really have a pre-conceived notion of what they would look like, but these guys are SO Albanian." Nick and I were less surprised to see Albanians on a flight to Albania, but it was all in good fun. We got picked up from the airport by the owner of our hostel, who conveniently held aloft a sign with my name on it and he welcomed us all to Albania. He drove us all into town and got us settled in. Sam was already here, obviously, and although dead tired we decided to go out for a bit. We found a restaurant just off the main square and had very delicious, very inexpensive food and caught up.