My wife and I had what we consider a second honeymoon to Italy. We went to Roma for 5 days, 4 nights. I had done some research ahead of time picking out what sites I wanted to capture. We stayed at the St. Regis Hotel. I used my hotel points for the stay.
We arrived in the mid afternoon and we managed to visit several sites in the early evening. It helps out quite a bit when the sun sets around 8:30pm and without kids. On family trips with the kids, I only manage to get 1/3 of the things I want to photograph or do, but on this trip it seemed like we managed to get almost all of it done in one afternoon! I remember thinking to myself that I may have booked too many days for this trip!
We went to Termini train station to try to look for a cellular store that sells PAYG sim cards WITH data. WIND was the carrier and at the hotel it had a strong signal–stronger than Vodafone. It was a bit pricy at 25 Euros each, but we got 3 GB of data for the month. I used about 1.5-1.75 GB of data in 5 day’s time! I mostly was using it with google maps which performed very well. It was so good that it suggested which bus lines to take so we can get to one place or another or simply back to our hotel. It didn’t give us one wrong turn. I’m not sure about the Apple Maps. I gave up on that app long time ago, when it came out actually.
It was about time for dinner, so we walked out of Termini Station and started to make our way to the Colosseum area. We found a Chinese restaurant that we had to try. One of our things we do is eat at a Chinese restaurant in a new country or town we arrive at. The lady inside was nice. The food was good. One of the young waiters dropped a few things nearby us. He wasn’t having a good day. One plus was they offered free wifi, but the security code was crazy random. We needed it because our data wasn’t going to be active on the WIND sim cards until about 1 hour after we bought it (7:30pm). We finished dinner about that time and I started to get the texts from the carrier that things we a go!
We made our way to Colosseum and there was still a lot of people hanging around. It was really neat to see. I had already knew that there was some scaffolding up fixing the taller side. Luckily, there was still a part that looked good and I was able to photograph. I used my tripod and timer to take our picture together.
We then went over to the Roma Forum since it was near by. By then the sun had set and the scene was a bit dark. There was a girl there hanging around waiting for my camera to finish a 4 minute exposure. She started asking me questions about long exposures. I always have to be careful that I’m not getting distracted and then there is someone else I’m not aware of attempting to steal my gear. Also the wife might have been getting jealous I was talking to another woman!
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