I’m currently living in Germany, and trying to settle down here, which is a story for another time filled with eldritch horrors beyond comprehension. But while I’m here, I’m trying to make the best of life in Europe, and the Christmas holidays meant it was time to go somewhere and do something. 2023 had been a terrible and incredibly stressful year, and getting out of the house was mandatory. Most importantly, my eyes needed rest from screens, and travel seemed like the only way to make that happen.
Our initial plan was to go to Switzerland, we have a good friend there and we thought of spending the holidays together, but one look at the flight prices from Berlin to Zurich nuked that plan immediately. 1000 Euros just for the return flights alone was ridiculous, and everything in Switzerland is expensive anyways, so we didn’t even bother to check the hotel prices.
My wife had always wanted to visit Italy, so we started looking at the flights to get there, and they were (relatively) cheap, 500 something Euros return. Hotel prices looked decent too, and of course there’s plenty to see in Italy. So, it was decided, Italy it’s going to be. I immediately started making unnecessary hand gestures and saying Mama Mia a lot in preparation.
Now, I suck at long term planning for trips. This is a side-effect of having done most of my traveling on motorcycles, you just get up in the morning, wash the dirt out of your eyes, and ride off into whatever direction seems pleasant, sleeping on couches or whatever. That’s why this whole plan to visit Italy was being made on 16 Dec 2023, with the start of the trip on 24th.
It is rather obvious but still must be stated, this is stupid and bad. Everything is more costly when booked just a week in advance, and we geniuses ended up booking things at even shorter notice as you’ll see soon. This trip could’ve costed us a lot less if we had planned ahead, but we didn’t, and there were no appointments available at the ministry of time travel. It is true that everything is generally just more costly in Europe, but we made sure to make it considerably worse.
The purpose of this article is to catalogue the places we visited, add some notes to myself for the future if I find myself there again, and note down the money we spent so I can compare it to future trips. I want to get better at planning these adventures in advance, and I want to measure the difference it makes in terms of cost. Also, I want to write again, it’s fun.
Our flights were in the afternoon from Berlin Brandenburg airport, so we had a chill breakfast at home and took a couple of trains afterwards. Both of us have the 49 Euro Deutschland ticket, which means that we can ride any regional train within Germany without needing a ticket, so this ride was technically free. Taking any trains in Germany however is always a hair-raising experience filled with delays and cancellations and chaos, especially if you have something important like a flight to take at the end. This time however DB kept the excitement levels low, and our train to Potsdam and then the connecting one to BER both were on time, surprisingly.
“German efficiency” is a myth.
One of the best examples of German weirdness is the new Berlin airport, the construction of which spawned multiple documentaries about the delays, cost-overruns, and the corruption that came along for the party. I’m not an airportologist, but BER is a weirdly unsettling one to pass through. One of the major issues is that for some inconceivable reason there are virtually no places to sit, what little uncomfortable backless sofa things they have lying around are obviously already taken. But then again once you have gone through a well-run airport like Delhi, most European airports feel like tiny little tea shacks.
But we were there for the flight, and it was an EasyJet one. I like EasyJet, I’ve flown with them to Scotland too, and I like them because they’re a low-cost airline, but not Ryanair level of cheap. I’m a nervous flyer, and although I know that Ryanair’s safety record is fine, I can’t handle rough flying, and I’ve seen too many Ryanair hard landing videos to trust them.
One advantage of flying low-cost airlines is that you’re forced to travel light. When the ticket is 80 Euros, but a check-in bag is 60 Euros on top, you try to force everything you can in your cabin luggage. It’s not like the cabin luggage is free, but at least it’s only like 30 Euros, and you don’t need to check it in or wait for it at the baggage belt afterwards.
This flight from Berlin to Rome was completely uneventful, thankfully, it was mostly cloudy, but we did manage to see some small mountain ranges in the distance looking pretty in the golden sunlight. We landed at the Leonardo da Vinci airport, and then had to figure out how to get to the main Rome city some 30 Kms away. The airport is nothing special, it is the main one for Rome so you’d expect it to be pretty grand, especially considering Rome is one of the most visited cities in Europe, but like all European airports it’s kinda small and meh, although the architecture is cool.
This was the start of a pattern of last minute bookings that continued throughout the trip. I hadn’t booked any bus or train tickets from the airport to Rome city because I was concerned about flight delays. This turned out to be a good idea in the end, because we decided to take the train, and the train station is surprisingly far away from the airport terminal. Good thing we only had two small backpacks and two small trolley bags, otherwise this walk would’ve been rather annoying.
We stood at the railway station and booked tickets right then, surprisingly cheap at only 28 Euros. There was a ticket checker standing by the train too, which is a concept unheard of in Germany, and it genuinely felt like she’d just walked off some railfan cosplay meet she looked that good. This was the beginning of two repeating patterns that we noted throughout Italy, they don’t have the severe manpower shortage that Germany has, and these people know fashion.
The train was fine, but it was strange to see a bigass hump in the middle of the carriage that you had to step over to get to the other side, space to accommodate the wheels I think. This was another special thing about Italy, I love their trains because they run on time, but they feel weirdly old and badly designed at times, something I’ll talk about much more later.
We had booked a room at Seven Guest Rooms, a short walk from the main Rome train station. Since this was holiday time, there was no staff at the hotel at all, which was kinda strange, like nobody to even take a copy of our passports, which has never happened before. It’s a small hotel, and the room was tiny, but everything else about that place is fantastic. The location couldn’t be better, you can walk to all the popular landmarks easily, and we did. Also there are plenty of restaurants and mini markets around for food or water. But most importantly, that tiny bathroom was one of the best I’ve ever used. The secret to a good bathroom is of course high water pressure, and the shower in this one is essentially a fire hose, it almost hurt at times it was so good.
We dropped our luggage and got some dinner, here a discussion of our eating habits is necessary. My wife and I have traveled to 10 odd countries so far, and we almost exclusively always ate at Indian restaurants while there. This is easier to justify in countries like Germany, Netherlands, Austria etc., whose cuisine seems to consist entirely of salted dead things, but it gets harder to explain this behavior in places like France, and especially now in Italy. When we were in Paris we didn’t eat at a French restaurant even once, our inability to read the menus and find out what we were potentially putting in our mouths didn’t help, and the one time we did dare to ask the chef if they had anything vegetarian, he made a face like we’d just insulted his mother and told us to get lost.
This time we had decided that we’ll push ourselves to eat some of the local food, we’ll get over the language barrier, we’ll take a goddamn chance. It helped that Italian food is not a completely unknown quantity, all of us have had noodles or pasta or pizza at some point, but of course for our first meal in Rome we ran to the nearest Indian restaurant.
There are a lot of restaurants in Europe which are actually owned and run by Pakistani or Bangladesh people, but which call themselves “Indian”, and god bless each and every one of them. Anyone who can supply me with some Dal, Paneer, and Roti is a superior being and must be worshiped. The food was nice, but there was a bit of a scare when one of the people on a different table started choking on their food. An ambulance was called and it arrived in minutes, which was nice to see, and they were rendered assistance.
While we were walking back to the hotel we saw a big, old looking building with yellow lights all around it. I knew we were close to the Colosseum, but I hadn’t realized how close. So we changed direction and started walking towards the yellow lights, and pretty soon found ourselves in front of this beauty. I will leave the description of this landmark for later, we ended up going inside too, but I will say that most “famous” things usually end up being rather meh when you finally see them in real life. The Colosseum is not one of them.
We walked around it, and then saw another big, old looking building with yellow lights in the distance. What ended up happening was that we kept walking for the next couple of hours chasing these lights, during which time we saw almost all the famous Rome landmarks, including the Pantheon and the Trevi fountain. By the time we got back to our hotel room, we’d already seen everything that Rome had to offer, which was concerning.
Steps walked: 18,361
| Item | Value (Euro) |
| Money spent on Tickets (Flight/Train/Bus/Entry Tickets) | 290.4 |
| Money spent on Food | 26.5 |
| Money spent on Hotel | 87.5 |
| Total spent for the day | 404.4 |
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