Had my last bowl of delicious cereal as we were getting ready to check out of the BNB that morning. We got a seat on the fast train and it was only an hour to Rome but the check in time wasn’t until 15:00 at our hostel which means two hours of lugging around our backpacks.

When I look out the train window and we move past farms and mountains my eyes start to close like they do when I’m scrolling through Instagram before bed. Something about how my eyes see the movement is like a lullaby without the noise. It’s something I’ve come to love about traveling by train.

We found our hostel with ease but had some time to kill. We were both hungry so we went to one of the hundred restaurants close by, ate some pasta and then lingered until we could check in. We went to our room, three bunk beds and a table. We both had bottom bunks that sucked because you couldn’t even sit upright in them, but we got over that. None of our roommates were in the room and we decided we didn’t want to explore the city until the next day so we went and had a pitcher at the bar that was part of the hostel.

We met a group of Germans, all 40 plus that are in a little photography club and were all traveling together like they do once a year to take pictures of cities. They usually go to places under communist rule, or recently under communist rule but they decided to hit Rome this time. They were really intrigued in our trip and Donald Trump, American politics followed us every city we went to. But that’s okay, we were traveling in an election year with a month until one of the weirdest presidential elections of all time. They left and some Australians sat by us and started chattin it up a bit. We eventually found out they were staying in the same room as us and we were glad because they were a funny group.

Nate and I grabbed more food and the Australians went to the store to buy jäger to get ready for the bar that night. The bar downstairs always has some type of performance or event at 22:00 then at midnight a dj comes on and turns the place into a disco, it’s a really good time. Expensive drinks tho, hence the jäger. We drank and talked and eventually made it to the bar. There was an American football game on tv. It wasn’t a good one, the Vikings were blowin out the Texans. But my eyes were glued regardless, I love American football. It was a warm evening so we were sitting outside and met some more Australians and a guy from Washington DC that was in the navy and was stationed out here. One of the Australians was one of the most reckless females ever. She was just sloppy drunk and vulgar in a gross way that no one really liked but she was also funny so she was bearable. At one point she walked around and asked everyone in the bar for their ID pretending she worked there. Again we danced and talked to people all night and didn’t make it back to the room until about 3:00.