Rome- day 1

We left for LAX at like 1 a.m. in the morning. Do you know how hard it is to wake up at 12:30 a.m. to go to the airport? Well, take my word for it... it's freaking HARD! Thank God Mabelle drove. Thanks girl.
We get on the plane and head over to DC. A couple of hours later we hop on a plane to head to ROME baby. I took a couple of Benedryl in hopes of sleeping through the flight. Unfortunately chatty charlie was sitting behind me and happened to have a super deep voice. Anybody that knows me knows that I have a hell of a time sleeping (a trait I inherited from my dad), let alone on a plane, with a chatterbox behind me. I gave him the stink eye a few times, but it didn't work. My powers must be weakening. So, even Benedryl could not make me fall asleep. I suffered through the 9 hour flight to Rome. We arrived at 7 a.m.ish Rome time. We jump on a shuttle to head over to the hotel and the first things I notice about this place is how dirty it seemed. There was a ton of graffiti EVERYWHERE. How sad to ruin a city with such a long history. So we're driving along and BAM, there's the Colosseum... right smack in the middle of this road. People just go around it like it's no big deal... but HELLO? this is the Colosseum... ya know, the one in Rome?!!!! It was huge and totally kick ass. We never did get a chance to go touch it, but there is always next time, right?
We get to our hotel and LUCKILY they let us check in (it's about 10:30 by this point). Our room turns out t be quite cute. Seriously, especially for the price... 290E for the 4 nights we stayed... plus breakfast is included. So we settle in a bit and decide to take a little nap. It felt good to stretch out. Our little nap took us into the evening and we woke up at like 5 p.m. Holy crap. We can't just sleep, otherwise we'd have a hell of a time sleeping at bedtime and the nightmare would continue. So we head over to the train station, conveniently located 1 block away from the motel, to check out our day-trip to Venice, and to pick up tickets for the same. Amazingly enough 2 chicks, both with masters degrees, one fluent in Italian, couldn't figure out how to use the damn phone cards (to call home) and couldn't find the freaking ticket counter/kiosk to buy train tickets. We finally DID find the ticket kiosk, but never figured out the card thing. We ended up going to an internet cafe to write the boys and let them know we were safe and sound. Before we headed to dinner we went to the supermarket to pick up some provisions to get us through the next couple of days. Travel tip #1: some of the best souvenirs are found at the grocery store. We dropped the bags off in the room and went across the street to have dinner at GIOVANNI'S. The food was yummy and hot and the prices were GREAT. We couldn't believe how inexpensive dinner was! I love that there is no smoking in the restaurants, although smoking on the streets is super prevalent and DISGUSTING!!!! After dinner we headed back to the room to catch a shower and get to bed.... since we had to catch a train to Venice.