Coliseum and Forum

What a fun day exploring the Forum. The Coliseum was kind of a let down. It was SO big and interesting to look at for the first 5 minutes, but after that it was like looking at the same thing from different directions for the money. It’s hard to explain how large it is and pictures do not do it justice. The bottom of it was most amazing to me, but of course you could only look down at it, you could not walk down there among the chambers where they must have kept the thieves they fed to the wild animals as a “snack” or the men who fought the wild animals or each other.

The Forum was more interesting as it was more spread out and current excavation was going on and you could walk among the ruins and old bath houses, etc.

It had more mystery to it for me. And what was left of some of the humongous pillars that were still standing awe struck me. How did they get those large blocks of stone on top of those tall, tall, large pillars without cranes? I’m still left wondering and pondering how those structures were build way back then and who lived in some of the houses they were excavating (or as they called them…huts).

We did a LOT of walking today. So we went to lunch at an Irish Pub

and talked with a girl working there from Scotland. We asked where the metro was and she said why don’t you take the bus...it will be faster. So we said ok, as we had purchased a Rome pass for unlimited public transportation and two museum, archeological finds, coliseum, or forum entrances for free. She told us which bus number to go on. We found one going to where we wanted and hopped on. We ended up hopping on the bus on the wrong side of the street. Which meant that we were going in the wrong direction of where we should have been going. But by the time we noticed it we were in an area that we didn’t want to get off so we just road it to the end and then road it back to where we got on…actually a few stops more to the train station. We got off there, bought tickets to the airport on the express for Thur. night for Deeanna and for Friday morning for me. We then hopped the metro one more stop to get to our stop.

Our new place has two bathrooms, one shower and one towel each. It’s right one the corner of a busy street and we have a balcony from the third floor looking down on the street. It is fun to open up the window and look out as the work scurries by.  Most of the night (till Midnight) there are tons of cars and people walking by then it slows down,  Here is what it looks like:

We went up to the room – did some internet and Deeanna wrote postcards and then we went to dinner across the street at Pepe’s and each had a small pizza (which is about a medium US pizza). We’ve found that the sizes here are much larger than we thought they would be and one course usually fills us up. But the cost of food is very high here for what you get. Our pizza cost 8.00 euros, which is about $11 US and that was for a small, thin crust pizza. I think the bartender liked Deeanna because he started practicing his tossing and throwing routine for her (she was facing him). I took some pictures and a video of him. He was actually pretty good.

We then went to the Trevi Fountain at night to take pictures and pick up a few things at one of MANY gift shops a long the way. I bought Michael 2 birthday presents from Rome since I was gone over his birthday. HAPPY Birthday again Michael…I hope you like your presents.

Well, off to sleep since it’s after 1am in the morning and we need to get up early to go get in line for Vatican city museum and such tomorrow. We need a whole day to do that, the castle and St. Peter’s Church. Another adventure…yeah. Kyla