Rome in a Day!

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Today we had a day full of tours planned! Kate tried to get on our tours but we weren’t sure it was the same tour or not as she had a diff starting point! So ben came and met us at our hotel and kate went off to her meeting point hoping we would meet up somewhere along the way! We got picked up at the hotel by bus and headed to Vatican city for our Vatican tour. Pretty much as soon as we got off the bus we saw kate in her tour and miraculously without us even asking the 4 of us got put with kates group! There were alot of groups so we were just very lucky! The tour was amazing! I had no idea what to expect at all as don’t know much about it. I was amazed to learn that it was its own country within a city! So cool! So I could get a lil flag to add to my collection! We wandered around the outside of the Vatican and in the museum showing us the amazing frescos all over the walls and roof. We had a bit of a speech outside looking at pics of the Sistine chapel cos apparently inside you weren’t able to speak or take any pics. So we learnt quite a bit about michaelangelos paintings and where his self portrait was in the pic and how he had got so angry at the pope for making him work so hard for such a long time that he painted the portrait of the pope in the dead skin painting on the roof. We got inside the Sistine chapel and it was incredible! I wish we had been able to take pics but we’ve snapped it in our memories! J After the chapel we moved on to St Peters basilica which was awesome! I couldn’t believe they have so many popes buried in there. They even have mummified popes in there that you can see! It was all pretty incredible. Again, very very impressive frescos everywhere! We came out and had some snaps infront of it, spent a bit of time looking for a Vatican City flag but failed at that for now and then decided to try and find our group again so we could get back to the hotel. Firstly cos we were so so hot in our pants and shoulder covering t-shirts that we needed to change and secondly cos we were getting picked up from our hotel for our next tour at 2pm!

We found our tour but all were very spread out and were in a souvenir shop. We couldn’t find our tour leader anywhere for ages. Eventually found her and she sort of pointed us in the direction of a bus very vaguely. So, we hopped on the bus and sat for like 20mins before it started moving, and it was HOT! And then we drove for about 5 mins and stopped and a few people including our driver hopped off. There was no sign of the driver for about another 30mins and by this stage we had about 20mins till we were meeting for the next tour. No-one on the bus had any idea what was going on so all 5 of us hopped off and flagged down a taxi to get us back. The taxi sped like iv never seen and feared my life a few times even, but he dropped us at the station cos we couldn’t explain to him where our hotel was. We had 5 mins so mum, dad and I raced back to the room to change and ben bought us some slices of pizza and diet coke and waited out the front for the tour bus. By 2.20 the bus still wasn’t there so we rang the tour company who said that the bus had turned up at 1.45 and no-one was there so they left! We asked what we could do and she very unhelpfully said that we could go on tomorrow’s tour – which we couldn’t cos we were leaving! So eventually we managed to get a street name off her where the driver was at that time and raced there in another super speedy dangerous taxi! We got dropped off and there was no sign of the tour so we had no idea what to do. We text kate who was on her tour and asked where she was which wasn’t too far away so she tried to stall her tour to see if we could join it cos by this stage our tour was long gone! So ben sprinted ahead breaking a “thong” on the way and tumbling – haha, and got to kates tour and managed to get them to stop, while mum raced ahead and i stayed back with dad trying to motivate him to walk faster and we even had a we trot slash jog from him at times! Anyway, long story short we were very lucky and kates tour waited and we were able to join a portugese/English group so we arrived all absolutely dripping with sweat and got thrust audio guides! What a stress! But we made it!

So our tour started in the Palatino Ruins where the romans lived back a veeeery long time ago. It was amazing to see. Reminded me a lot of olympia and all the ruins there. Luckily there were so many water taps everywhere cos we were all so hot so we could rehydrate. The ruins were pretty amazing and they showed where the ground level used to be which was so much higher than the ground level we were walking on. The next part of the tour was the roman ruins where the romans worked. This was also amazing! They had archaeologists working down in the ground still searching for missing parts of the ruins which was pretty incredible.

After the ruins we got walked to the Colosseum which ben was very very (at an understatement) excited about! He was like a lil kid! Mind you we were all pretty excited! It is pretty freaken amazing! The fact that so so much of it is still standing is just mind blowing! We got to wlak inside it and our tour guide filled us in about the events that happened there and we saw where the animals came from and where they fought etc. It was amazing! So we took our snaps here and then found a lil posie in the corner of the colosseum to plan our next move. The tour was finishing there and we wanted to stay around here for the evening so said bye to the tour. We found a retuarant on trip advisor which was close but unfortunately it was shut till 7pm and it was a bit earlier so while we waited we walked a bit further to Monumento A Vittorio Emanuele – which honoured the first king of Italy. It was a massive massive monument which I think is now a gallery! One of my fav buildings in rome I think.

Afterwards, we decided we had already walked away from the restaurant we had found so we headed in the direction of home and saw we weren’t far from the Pantheon so went to see that! Also very cool and right in the middle of a square with restaurants everywhere! So we picked on that had cute lil red checked tablecloths for our last dinner all together. It was yummy and we had really funny, cool waiters which was fun for our last night. We hung out there for a while and then started wandering home. On the way we finally found the gelato shop that mum had been talking about since we got to Italy! But it didn’t have 500 flavours, it had 150! Still aaaaaalot! We were all very very excited and mum was the most excited I have seen her all trip so far!!! It was pretty cool! So so so many flavours to choose frm we didn’t know where to start! We were all like lil kids on xmas morning! But we all ended up choosing and you literally had to roll us outta the shop afterwards!! They were huge! We decided to walk it off a lil so went to Piazza Navona and wandered around looking at all the paintings. Ben and I finally found a nice painting of the colosseum which we had been looking for which was cool. We then had to say bye to kate and ben as we were leaving very early in the am to get to the airport to fly to Athens then santorini. We have had an amazing trip so far and absolutely loved Italy!!

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