Italy - Day 1 ATMs, SIM cards, public transport, and Pig

We landed in Italy today. I got very little sleep on the flight. The seat was fairly comfortable, the cabin was dark, but no sleep would come. This generally makes for a rough day...However, this is vacation and we're going to have fun, dammit!

Immigration and customs at the Rome airport were a breeze. Kris tried to get cash from two ATMs in the baggage claim area, but one machine was temporarily out of order and the other looked to be a more permanent form of broken. As we continued thru the concourse, there was brightly decorated station selling sim cards. We stopped to inquire; we learned that they were offering 10GB for 30 days for an astounding 160€! Ouch! This made AT&T's 'access your home data plan for *only* 10$ a day' seem...plausible.

And so we persevered and exited the terminal. While Kris found yet another broken ATM, I found a TIM kiosk where a very helpful and friendly agent so us a 30GB for 30 days SIM for, you guessed, 30€. It's probably way more than we need, but it was such a good deal, I couldn't say no. He swapped out my SIM (And helpfully taped it to the card so I wouldn't lose it and double checked all of my phone settings so it would work. The only downside is that it took better than an hour for the SIM to activate...Which meant no data. Which wouldn't have been a problem, except we weren't as buttoned up for the first day of travel as we needed to be.We generally knew were our AirBnB was, but weren't 100% sure how to get there. Anywho, Kris found a working ATM and we made our way to the train station to board the Leonardo Express.

I always marvel at public transport when I'm in, well, almost everywhere else. The Leonardo express is super easy, get on at the airport, get off when it stops for the first and only time at the Roma Termini. So much easier than trying to figure out a strange car and strange roads fresh off a plane with little sleep. It's amazing anyone survives coming to the US.

Things fell apart a bit after the train though. I sort of knew where our apartment was, but with luggage and much tiredness, hoofing it wasn't going to work.  After some back and forth between the bus station and the train station, we figured out how to get where we were going, got on a bus and made it to the neighborhood of our AirBnB, By the way, if you haven't tried downlading Google Maps for an area before you get somewhere, you really should. No internet access is needed for car navigation once you've downloaded the area. Walking and public transport directions still need Internets, however.

Unfortunately, my SIM still hadn't quite activated when we got to the block with our apartment, which meant that we couldn't contact our host to let her know we had arrived. So Kris and did some phone voodoo to put his US SIM back in while I played the reboot game, hoping it would somehow trigger the SIM. This of course meant both of us got network at the same time. Yay!

Luckily, our host was waiting for us and let us in to the apartment. We gamely tried to listen to her introduction of the house and of Rome, but a nap was calling us both. She caught on and hustled herself out the door and we both crashed fora couple of hours.

When we awoke it was dinner time, but neither of us were up for anything too arduous. I poked around for a bit and found a nearby sandwich shop called the Angry Pig. A short walk across the river and along Vatican City and we were in hog heaven. A big beer for each of us and tasty, tasty porchetta on toasted bread with spicy (but not too spicy) pepper sauce for Kris and pepper sauce and sauted rapini for me. All I can say is YUM!!!

Tired and full, we headed back for a real night's sleep, knowing we have an early start ahead of us tomorrow. We're off to Naples and a tour of Pompeii! Can't wait!