Roma

Hi Everyone! We landed in Rome at about 10:00 a.m. this morning. We had a moderately bumpy ride, so of course I didn't sleep alot. We shared a taxi with another family and went to the hotel, We were exhauseted so we slept for a couple of hours. After we woke up and cleaned up we went out to see what was close to our hotel. It's raining quite a bit here now so we had to walk around in big coats and use our umbrellas. The first place we went was the Piazza della Repubblica and sat in a little cafe and drank cappuccinos looking over a beautiful fountain that had some icicles hanging from some of the statues. We walked up and down some streets with shops and went inside some of them. We saw lots of beautiful cooking, tea, and bakery stores. There are beautiful Christmas lights along the streets and traditional pastries in Christmas and nativity scenes this time of year. We ended up at a delicious restaurant called Target (not the one with the bullseye) We had white wine, toasted garlic and oil bruschetta, spinach and bacon salad, tomato and basil linguini and a trio of desserts that had tiramisu, of course. We also had more coffee. We have a lot to learn about coffee here. I don't think Starbucks has infiltrated it's coffee values upon Italy, yet. There doesn't seem to be such a thing as a sugar free skinny vanilla latte with no foam. The choices here are coffee (a stiff shot of espresso), americano (a stiff shot of espresso with added hot water), and cappuccino (a stiff shot of espresso with a splash of milk and foam). I'm no coffee sissy, but this will take some getting used to. Thankfully I still have a couple more days to try out the coffee situation and prepare myself for the Ethiopian version of the stuff. So delighted to be in Italy which seems to be the coffee and dessert capitol of the world. Pretty sure heaven will have a coffee and pastry shop that looks out over that fountain! Miss you all already.
Christy