When in rome...

The flight from Geneva to Rome was pretty uneventful. I think we fought about something..I fail to remember what it was about. Must have been quite irrelevant. :)

When we landed at the airport, I almost felt like I had left Europe and reached Mumbai. The weather was hot, the airport was more like airports in India, no fancy stuff. The orderly fashion in which people stand at airports in US was missing. It was a mad frenzy to get the bags of the belt into the carts and whiz past the others like you were the first to arrive.
Again, we just vaguely knew where the hotel was. You would think that by this time, we would have learnt a lesson. But nope. We were in for the adventure. :)

We had actually booked a car in Italy as well since we were getting a real cheap deal. But everyone had warned us about driving in Italy and no one had warned us about Geneva. So, we decided to do a "no-show" at the car rental. Fortunately, there was no credit card needed to book the car. When we came out, we were hit by the warm weather and sheer number of people...I almost thought that someone was going to say "chalo chalo sawari baith lo...gaadi paanch minute mein nikalegi". There were several buses waiting and for about 13 euros they take you to the city center. It was past 8 and we were worried about how we were going to get to the hotel. We knew it was very close to the train station, but did not where. The bus journey took us to places and streets that were slowly getting deserted. After we reached the train station, it was completely deserted with just one newspaper stand open. We didnot want to start walking in any direction since all the streets looked similar. Again, we did not know where to find the street names. To top it all, we had no maps.

We asked the newspaper guy and he did not know the hotel, but knew the street. He pointed us in the direction and we started to walk. On the way, there were a few stores open which looked like the typical grocery stores back in India. There were a few internet places open, but the place looked quite shady and we were too worried to get in. Finally, we found our hotel which was on the second floor of one of the buildings. It was a pretty old hotel but functional. We went down to get dinner. For about 10 euros, we got pizza, salad, panini, soda.

This was the only place which did not have an A/C. I guess booking online sometimes has its drawbacks....