Romeing Around: "We're seeing a movie and then going to a very Italian McDonald's" and Day 1 of Cinque Terre Paradise!

So when Michal visited Julia and I told him that all we're doing that night is going to downtown Rome and seeing a movie. Obviously he didn't believe us, but we also told him that all we're doing is going to find a McDonald's that's supposedly really good (in actuality we were looking for L'Archetta, the best spaghetti place ever). I'm not sure if he believed us, there's a possibility that he did, but who knows. Anyways, we took him to see the Trevi Fountain, the Spanish Steps and the Pantheon at night, then dinner and then gelato heaven with its 60 flavors of gelato. All in all I think it was a pretty great first day in Rome for him :)

Then Thursday night we left for Cinque Terre. We got to Cinque Terre, got off the train in Riomaggiore, walked 5 feet, looked down and realized that the sea was right there and that we were on a cliff. Since we got there at 4:30am we walked around a bit. We found our hostel but since it didn't open till 10:30 we explored the town (which is tiny and filled with stairs). It was pitch black out, with maybe a person here and there walking there dog. It was basically a ghost town though, until about 6am when people started coming out to begin their day. We went up to this castle/observatory/clock tower and saw the sky getting lighter, then we went to the beach (which is really a small area of big rocks, no sand) and hung out there for a while. We slept, talked, walked, enjoyed :) Then, since we still had an hour before the hostel opened (even though the guy came in at 9:30, he refused to let us in), we played cards, which was definitely a lot of fun!

When we were finally able to check in, this guy comes up to us (probably around our age) and tells us to follow him to our hostel (which we later find out is more like an apartment), turned the corner and saw stairs. and more stairs. and even more stairs. We eventually counted that there were 166 steps to our apartment :( It was painful and tiring and Julia, Michal and I collapsed on our beds from exhaustion. That's 1/3 of how many stairs we had to climb to get to the second floor of the Eiffel Tower. So after we recovered from this, we changed into our swimsuits and went to the last town, Monterosso, to go to the beach. The weather was beautiful, a perfect day for the beach. Since the sun was shining down hard, Julia and I put a ton of sunscreen on, though we ended up putting on so much we didn't really tan. Michal, on the other hand, didn't really listen to me so he got a little burned. But he learned his lesson and when we went on the hike the following day and the beach on Sunday, he put more sunscreen on.