Rome and Back Again: a Drunkard’s Tale

ALBUM - Westway (The Glitter & The Slums) by Sticky Fingers

I’m back! I know, I surprised myself too. Let’s get right to it shall we? Today, I would like to share with you (or at least try to) the tales of my two weeks travelling in central Europe. Normally, when I go on holiday with friends I will keep a week-long diary in my phone for me to read back on the memories. This time I decided that annoyingly long Snapchat stories would suffice. My travelling pal and best friend of 15 years, Emily, tends to black out when drunk, so a standard morning-after activity is jogging her memory of the night’s antics with my Story. Now imagine that for two weeks straight: I’m pretty sure she remembers less than 50% of our time in Europe. So I dedicate this post to her, so that she might remember more.

After a mere 5 days in Catania I jetted off to Rome to meet Emily. We were staying in a hostel where we met our partners in crime for the next three days, Zara and Jojo. Now, my dear reader, I considered myself quite hardcore until I met these fine women: every night they filled two water bottles, one with gin and one with water and drank individually from them. Chasing gin with water is NOT something I would ever recommend - leave it to the experts. So after a messy pres one can only imagine the chaos that ensued: my personal highlight was Emily getting married to a boy we affectionately nicknamed Rory the Tory (I’m still not sure whether the guy who ‘married’ them was officially ordained, but he insisted he was). The next day, after one of the worst breakfasts we have encountered - Emily: “this croissant tastes like deoderant”, we forced our hungover selves to see some sights of the Eternal City: we were overwhelmed by the sheer size of the Colosseum and unimpressed by the Trevi Fountain which seemed as if it had been plonked awkwardly amidst numerous fast food chains. We did make the mistake of paying €20 for a tour of the Colosseum: we were hungover and took one look at the 3 hour long queue to go inside and decided nope that was not for us. The Colosseum really is amazing, but I think the outside is its definite good side, so note to self save the money and take your pics outside! The real star of the show for me, however, was Piazza Venezia. If you haven't visited Rome, put that at the top of your list of things to see. I’m still angry that we were stupid enough to visit Vatican City and not see St. Peter’s Basilica, I’m not sure how we missed it, but somehow we did.

After promising ourselves we would return, we bid farewell to our crazy hostel and travelled onto Florence, where who should be there to greet us in our hostel but none other than Emily’s new husband! What better city for a honeymoon? We arrived in the evening and went straight to the centre, where my very *cultured* friend gave her educated opinion of the Duomo - “What the f*ck is that? It looks like a 4 year old painted it”, I do despair! Florence was a lot more relaxed than Rome as most of the clubs are on the outskirts, so we would spend our evenings drinking in Irish bars and wandering around the beautiful city eating gelato, we felt like we were living the high life.

Now as any financially unstable student will know, money is saved for drink and drunk food. So, shrewdly we skipped staying in Venice and thought an afternoon would be enough. This was a good idea until we realised we would have to carry our 20 kilo bags around the city. Shit. There better be a luggage hold. Luck was on our side and we dumped the bags and headed out to the Island. This is however where the good luck ended: the weather took a turn for the worse and we two English girls in short shorts and t-shirts got trapped in 7 hours worth of rain. It’s true what they say, Venice really is sinking: when the rain sets in everyone wears these bizarre knee-high shoe covers, because the closer you get to St. Mark’s Square the deeper the water gets. Despite the weather we still saw how beautiful the city was, I think it's the telltale sign of a beautiful city that you can still see its beauty in the rain. But, when we made it back to the station for our overnight train, we were decidedly regretful of our choices when we realised the next 11 hours would have to be spent in our wet clothes sharing two seats: this was our bed for the night.

After neither of us slept very much through the night we vowed never to book an overnight train again. I take this opportunity to apologise to Emily publicly for sleeping on top of her and crushing her poor feet all night. At 7am we arrived in Vienna with no hope of a bed for at least another 7 hours. We found our hostel and crashed on their sofas before dragging our sorry, tired arses round the city. Vienna is a beautiful city and as I was walking round I definitely thought I could imagine myself living there, but the nightlife we found certainly left a lot to be desired. Perhaps we were unlucky with the fact we were there during the week but Vienna is a very quiet capital city at night. I’m afraid I do not have one funny drunken anecdote to regale you with. We also visited the palace which was breathtaking, but for the most part the weather we had made us want to hibernate. On our last day we really did, however, get to appreciate Vienna for the wonderful city it is: we treated ourselves to strudel and coffee in a square and lounged on the side of the Danube canal listening to music and appreciating the vivid street art the canal has to offer, before we set off for Budapest.

Emily and I discussed our favourite places on the trip many times, for me it was Budapest. Budapest broke Emily, I must admit. After the first bar crawl she spent all of 5 minutes in the club before being carried home by yours truly. I, of course, didn’t let that stop me and amazingly found my way back to the club! The next day, not really knowing where our sightseeing would take us, we wound up at the Széchenyi baths, without bikinis I might add. Desperate to have a look around (and get that all important Instagram pic) we paid our money and walked around like absolute idiots while everyone else sported swimming costumes… naturally. With Emily’s first night in Budapest being such an embarrassment, we tried our luck at a second bar crawl - a Bingo Bar Crawl. The aim of the game is to do dares to complete a line and win prizes. Over the course of the night I took a shot of Unicum (it’s not what you think), got HERPES written in bright pink on my forehead, danced the macarena with my pants down (it was only after that they told me pants meant trousers… NOT underwear) and a whole host of other embarrassing things. And why might you ask did I do this to myself? For a free t-shirt. Yep, I walked around with an STD on my forehead all night for a free t-shirt, what a life. Neither of us made it to the club that night and Emily actually fell asleep in one of the bars - like i said broken.

Zagreb was next on our travels, and Budapest had caught up with both of us, so we decided to have a quiet one in (I’m as shocked as you are). Georgia Flynn (that’s me), being clever, picked up a pair of earplugs at reception. If she hadn’t she would have had the night Emily had - being woken up at 5am to an hour long intense romping. Apparently after the shock she was unable to go back to sleep - traumatised clearly.  Zagreb didn't have enough for me if I’m honest, Croatia is a very small country with a very small population which gives Zagreb less of a capital city feel and to me it felt more relaxed with less going on. Perhaps it was just quiet in comparison to what we had left in Budapest.

Last on our travels before returning to Rome, and parting ways, was Split - Emily’s favourite and my close second. Split is not only gorgeous, it has an amazing night life as well. Our first day there, we went to a rocky beach which turned out not to be a beach at all, but rocks that you jumped into the sea from. I jumped onto a sea urchin. Apparently a sea urchin can cause muscle paralysis and even death, my encounter just left me with a hell of a lot of spiky things in my foot. So I limped my way round Split and drank so it didn't hurt so much. But as usual with these things, the next day you wake up regretting drinking and still in pain. Hungover and feeling sorry for myself the next day we made a duvet fort and watched Netflix and drank milkshakes while it rained outside, preparing ourselves for our final night out. We spent most of the evening at a bar, sang the entirety of Mr Brightside at the tops of our lungs in competition with the locals who were very fond of singing their national anthem at an antisocial volume, before heading back to the hostel to have a “3rd floor party”. We were interrupted however by a friend staying on that floor stopping us on the steps to tell us we HAD to come back in 30-40 minutes… After a giggle and a tease we made our way downstairs, but not before we realised that our friend was making the entire hostel shake, well done him eh?

So we returned to Rome and said our goodbyes before getting on planes to different countries, and this is where I will end my story. I hope you enjoyed my memoirs and perhaps I have inspired you to go and see some more of Europe, I only wish I had had more time to visit more. I chose the Sticky Fingers album as it was introduced to me while in Split and since adding it to my Spotify I have become hooked and thought I would share the masterpiece with you. Thank you Dan, Max and Ollie for showing them to me. If you would like a more visual representation of my travels I did post an obscene amount of pictures on my Instagram as well : https://www.instagram.com/mymiddlenameisnotjoan/ check it out if you fancy. Until next time!