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Published: September 14th 2007
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Ray the mule
Yeah, that's right, I made Susie carry the camera. Pig of a man. Hello everybody!
Rome has given me some faith that Italy isn't a complete waste of time and money. Actually, that's a bit unfair, it's not been so bad, but Rome has definitely been an improvement anyway. The people have been helpful, and the city itself is amazing. We arrived a bit after lunchtime, and since it stays light for so long, we were able to see a few things before bed-time.
Getting to our accommodation was a bit of an effort. We were supposed to be staying in a nice little place, the only place we had fully prepaid before we got to Europe. But when we arrived we found out that to get there, we would have to catch the Metro all the way out of Rome, then catch another bus, if there is one, to actually get to where we were staying. We were tired, and that didn't sound like much fun, so we decided to find somewhere else. So we walked out of the station, found the first hotel that didn't have a "full" sign up, and got a room there, for about the same price, and if you can spit about 100m, we're within spitting
Colosseum
It's really breathtaking seeing buildings like this as you're just walking along. The building itself is so spectacular. There are no photos that do it justice distance of the train station. And the state our luggage is in now, being close to a train station is a good thing. As you can see from the photo.
We checked in, and then went for a bit of a walk around the place to see what's going on. It's pretty amazing when you step outside and walk for 10 minutes, to see the Colosseum, ancient ruins, the Palatine...all these things are just sitting around the place, as common as 7-11s in Brisbane! We went up to the Colosseum and there are people everywhere trying to get you to go on the last tour of the day. At first I ignored them, because I've learned to ignore people offering me anything, especially is they say anything like "good price", but then I realised they were actually legitimate, and quite a good price! So we took a tour of the outside of the Colosseum, and then the guy - Stephano was his name, of course - said that our ticket got us into the ancient palace and that it was closing in a minute so we could go for another tour through there because that was part of what
Dodgy Character
Stephano, the guy that shirked his job and made people complain to the nice tour guide. Pft. we paid. What he didn't say was that basically, he didn't feel like going through the Colosseum, so he palmed us off onto some other guy, and even though we had paid to get a tour of the Colosseum, we missed out. But, the flip side is, the guy that gave us the tour of the Palace was really, really good, and then he said that he does another tour of Rome at about 6:00, and so we went on that with him too.
He was ridiculously good at what he does. It was one of those tours that takes you down the back streets and shows you things you wouldn't usually see. For example, he showed us the smallest working replica of St Peter's Basilica, which is only open for 15 minutes every day, but we got to go in and it's pretty cool, although churches still give me the creeps and I don't like being in them. Which isn't a good thing in a city that has 927 churches (that's a real figure, by the way). He also showed us some of the other sights but told us interesting stories about them, better than the boring statistics
Susie at the Colosseum
Susie just inside one of the entrance gates. We only got to spend about 15 minutes in the Colosseum - that was a bit dumb. you usually get, and then showed us a great Gelateria, and a really cool wine bar, where we spent most of the rest of the night. We met a few girls from England who had just started uni, explained to them that it was a bit unreasonable for them to get upset at paying 50 pound to get to Italy compared to us, and then chatted to them until we went to bed. They were hilarious actually, it was really nice talking to some people, because up to then we hadn't really spoken to many people other than each other.
So yeah, that was today. Very good all in all, looking forward to tomorrow.
Hope everybody's well
Bye bye
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