Wednesday August 16

The breakfast was much better! Fresh croissant!! Fruit! We ate breakfast and lazily woke up. We traveled to Porta San Giovanni to go to a flea market but it turned out they only had purses and luggage for sale. We took a bus to the Colosseum and walked around the Roman Forum and the Colosseum, and saw some views. We got a really good sandwich at a place called Pane e Vino and went into a record shop and bought some local punk 7"s. We talked to the guy at the counter for 30 minutes about the Italian punk scene, and learned a lot. We also went to a cafe in this area called Analemma, that had a great espresso! It also had interesting art on the walls. We went back to the hotel to freshen up, and accidentally spent 3 hours sitting around and going on the internet. It was super worth it, we were exhausted from traveling for so long. Around 8 PM, we took a bus and went to Trastevere. We walked past a filming of the TV show Trust before dinner. We walked around Trastevere and kept walking past restaurants, not sure about which one to go into. Eventually, we saw one called Tonnarello that was very crowded, and looked good, so we asked the person out front how long the wait would be for two people, and he showed us a line with about 8 parties in front of us! We were not sure if we wanted to get into line, but we got in line and talked about it for a minute. I asked the woman in front of us if this was the line in Italian, and she responded yes, and then in perfect English told us that the restaurant was supposed to be very good. It ended up that they were from Toronto, and we chatted with them while waiting in line. Dinner was amazing, fresh pasta and wine. I got tonarello cacio e pepe, which is a Roman staple of pasta with cheese and pepper, and Mike got tonarello carbonara and a Negroni. They were both amazing, as the restaurant was known for their homemade tonarello, a type of spaghetti that is a little thicker and egg based, I believe. Then we got beers at a bar called Ma Che Siete Venuti A Fà, which is known to be one of the best beer bars in all of Italy. They were playing some great music! We had a couple of Italian beers, and then took a bus back to the hotel and went to bed!