Jen, Vanessa and I in our room before our night out
Day 1: Thurs Sept 29: Arrived at hostel which was really close to the train station, thank goodness. Caught up on the blog, and just relaxed after the travel day. Early evening I met some great girls (jen and vanessa) staying in the same room who were also from Toronto, and were doing a whirlwind trip thru europe. (you think i'm seeing a lot on my trip, try spending each night in a different city. I dont know how they're doing it!) We went for dinner at a place near the hostel. After some delicious pasta and salty broccoli, we attempted to find a pub crawl we had heard about at the Spanish steps but failed. May have been because Rome's subway sucks--there's only two lines to begin with, and one of them stops at 9 pm! Naturally, that was the line we needed. We were forced to wait for the bus, which meant we did not make it there by the 10 o'clock cut-off. I wasn't too upset--I really just wanted the t-shirt. We decided that since we had already come all the way out here, we would just make our own pub crawl. Turns out we picked the worst possible area to do this in, as it was the shopping centre of Rome, and it took a good hour of wandering until we found any type of suitable establishment. Finally near Piazza Navona, some promoters came up to us offering a good deal so we decided to check it out. Open bar until 12:30! Score.

We get there, order our drinks, and then get told that'll be 15 Euros. Each. Turns out there is a cover charge for this "open bar" which we just assumed was free (don't ask me why we didn't think about this). Since it was already midnight, we decided to just pay for the one drink and then go somewhere else. We met two Italians who chatted us up, and as the only other people in the bar, we couldn't exactly make a quick exit. They started doing dream interpretation (explains a lot) and talking about Italy in very broken english. They wanted to go dancing, and anywhere else had to be better than the place we were currently in, so we went along. We ended up in this club called La Maison, which actually reminded me a lot of clubbing in Toronto, but it was fun. Oh yeah, did I mention we partied with DJ Afrojack?