We spent most of the past 24 hours on a boat, again. We got aircraft type seats this time around. This means you get access to a room with a bunch of aircraft type seats. Fortunately for us, there was no one else who got an aircraft seat, so we were able to pretty much lay our stuff out on the floor and crash. The seats themselves were comfortable, but there was no way to raise the armrest between the seats to lay out on them. So we made our own bed and pillows on the floor and proceeded to have a semi-comfortable night of sleep.

We spent all our time on the boat either eating, on the slowwwww internet, or sleeping. We planned a bit for our trips to Nice and Barcelona, and checked emails and followed up on messages from friends/family.

Once we got off the boat in Ancona, we figured out a way to get to the central Ancona train station via a regional train. This was a free train that took us from Ancona Marittima (the port station) to Ancona's main station. It was a very short, 7 minute ride. The train was surprisingly nice on the inside for a free regional train (at least, free for us with Eurail passes).

We had a couple of hours to kill at Ancona station before our 2 pm train to Roma Termini. We got some lunch, consisting of more seafood than we originally expected, but realized it made sense since Ancona is a port town. We also spent some time looking up stuff to do in Rome (like where to eat, what to see, how to avoid getting pick-pocketed, etc).

The train ride to Rome was excruciatingly boring. There was some nice scenery, but that got old after the first couple of hours, and we still had another 2 hours remaining. Sahna seems to have been hit with some bad sinus pressure, so as boring as the ride was for me, it was probably even worse for her :( It didn't help that the windows were down in our AC cabin, so every time we went through a tunnel our ears popped because of the sudden change in pressure. Suffice to say, we were very happy to get off the train 4 hours after we got off. Another note, I'm not sure why Europeans hate Americans for being "loud" because most of our train ride consisted of a super loud/rowdy group of Italians. They were on par with a group of drunk Texans after a UT football game...

We got off at Roma Termini station with our senses hightened in order to avoid any pickpocketing. Fortunately, we made it to our hostel with all our belongings intact. Here's to praying that it stays that way the rest of our trip. The hostel itself isn't too bad so far. We did have to pay 5€ for Wi-Fi tho :(

Once we set all our stuff down, we walked back to the station and purchased our 25€ Roma Passes, which will allow us to skip the ticket lines at the Colosseum and other sites in Rome, in addition to giving us free transportation on the metro and the buses! The lines at the Colosseum are usually 2-3 hours long, so skipping that line in itself should be worth the 25€ we're paying. But I think at the end of our trip, we'll end up saving a bunch of cash just like we did with the Paris Museum Pass.

The most delicious slice of lasagna I've ever had

We rounded off the night with a nice dinner at Ristorante Da Giovanni, recommended by our Rick Steves' guidebook. I ordered a delicious Lasagna and Sahna ordered Fettucini alla Giovanni, both of which were extremely tasty. After wharfing down our food, we ended up waiting for about 20 minutes for our check to arrive, which probably seemed like an eternity to Sahna since her sinus' started acting up again. She denies that it did feel like an eternity, but I still feel bad that she had to go through that. In any case, we were more than happy to give them our money and get back to our hostel.

We made the 20-minute walk back and showered the past two days worth of grime off ourselves. Now time for me to get my rest and Sahna to try and sleep off her sickness before a big day seeing the most famous sights in Roma!