Rome on a budget

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We spent the last 4 nights of our week Italy trip in Rome. We were really looking forward to a big city after Venice.

We arrived here in the morning, checked into our hotel after another walk with our backpacks although this one was a lot shorter as the hotel is situated only 2 minutes walk from Termini station. Got off lightly there!!

Well again we didn’t waste much time in the room and were off exploring the city. First stop the Colosseum. Wow it really was amazing to see this in real life. We paid to go inside, Sonny decided to get an audio tour. I opted out as I haven’t got the best concentration and like to wander around looking at things blankly (maybe the blonde in me coming out).

We spent the next few days walking around the city exploring all of the ancient and famous sites as you can see from the pictures. We did get a metro pass but you still can’t get away with walking a lot in Rome as there are only two metro lines- understandable why there isn’t though. Every time you turn your head you see a different Roman ruin.

On our last full day we went to see The Vatican. As advised by the woman in our hotel we went there early, as the queues are long. We didn’t get there as early as planed but arrived there at about 10am and the queue was horrendous. It took us about 2 hours to get in!! We did have a lot of entertainment during our time queuing though. This was mostly thanks to the Japanese tourist. They are not the best at queuing maybe because they are generally small and they think that they can just weave through the queue un-noticed. It by all means was not un-noticed but they got away with it- can be frustrating when your queuing for that length of time. We had a laugh about it though.

The Vatican was amazing. The Sistine chapel was awesome. We could stay there for ages and look at all the detail (as long we were sitting down- our legs were aching after the long queue). We were out about mid afternoon but the craziest thing was that the queue had completely disappeared. Last time we listen to someone’s advise about going early and beating the queues.

Well our last trip in Europe for a long time has come to an end. We will miss our city breaks in Europe but are looking forward to our new adventure. As we are going to be backpacking for over 4 months we thought that when we went to Italy we would take our backpacks and have a dummy run. This definitely helped us decide a few things.

#1 Kathryn not to overload her backpack with clothes- I suppose I can’t have a different top each day.
#2 For us to take our SLR camera with us- this has been an on-going debate for ages as it is a big camera and would probably be a nuisance to carry around. However after taking it with us in Italy we realised that the camera was a must because the pictures it takes outweigh all of the cons.

Well this is it! Our Italy trip is over bring on Dubai...

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Photos

The Spanish steps
Was very hard to get a good shot of this as it was so crowded.

This must not be allowed!!!
Sonny drinking on the steps of a museum.

Inside the Vatican
So many paintings, so little time.

The Pond inside the Vatican
2 minutes before this photo was taken a Japanese woman fell in this pond. Don't ask us how, all we saw were arms and legs and then her husband pulled her out.