I'm back from my amazing holiday in Italy which honestly felt so surreal when I was there [a word that gets thrown around a lot] however we were pinching ourselves swimming in the ocean with the Italian scenery all around like we were on the set of a movie or something. There were 7 ladies plus the host and our photographer so 9 of us altogether staying in a renovated monastery and we were the first guests in over 200 years. The monastery has taken 6 years to renovate to this stage and it's not finished yet however we were the first guests and had the whole place to ourselves which was very special.
Italy is a long long away and it takes forever to get there with flight times and in between. I left Brisbane at 2.00 am in the morning having to arrive at the airport at 10.00 pm and the first leg to Dubai was 14 hours which after 7.5 I thought we had 1 hour to go and I asked the hostess how long to go and she said 6.5 hours to which I thought OMG how am I going to sit in this position for another 6.5 hours. We were actually very lucky because the plane was half full so the middle section of 4 seats where I was seated, I was on the right isle and there were 2 spare seats and then another passenger was on the left isle side.
Once I got off the plane in Dubai I just followed the crowd including catching the internal airport train to the correct terminal to head off to Rome and I had about 5 hours or so until I boarded the next plane. The flight to Rome was about 6.5 hours and then went through customs and I got in the wrong passport queue so was in a queue for about 45 mins [following the crowd] when in fact I could have gone to the other self service line for the Aussies. I had been travelling for over 30 hours by this stage and given I haven't been out of the country for 23 year this was all new to me and could have saved me standing in that queue. When I got to the top of the queue the lady pointed to the right to the self service passport machines and I said I'm here now can they just stamp it for me which they did.
I then collected my luggage and got pulled up about 4 metres from the front of the airport - show me your passport, how long are you here for, how much money do you have. After a couple of minutes I left the airport terminal and waited in the taxi queue to go to my hotel. As the hotel was in the inner city the taxi is a set fee of 55 Euro [$98 AUD]. I finally arrived and checked into my hotel and I think it was around 9.45 pm Rome time.
I had a sleep in and went upstairs to the breakfast room which was lovely and had a meal and then headed out to the Spanish Steps which was half a km from my hotel. This was the only thing I had planned and knew it was near my hotel so I did that first. Here's a few photos to start with.
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