Just kinda had a look around near our hotel and tried to get some sleep. Our room was pretty decent - clean, not too small, it had air conditioning (as we found out the 2nd night...), and a whole two english channels(well MTV was near enough english - though naz managed to memorize one or two of the italian songs they played much to her dismay!).
On friday we decided to get the most expensive and possibly famous land mark out of the way so we went to the colosseum. We decided to go on a tour so that we wouldn't just be walking around going... hmm nice old building... and it was really impressive... Its odd to think how old it is and so much of it has survived! So took just a few pics... I'll guess I'll just add a couple on here... basically through the week I maxed out my 256mb SD card... and mostly on architechture... well its not my fault - there is an awful lot of architecture in Rome... Also with the tour of the colosseum there was a tour of the roman forum included - now that was interesting. The colosseum however grand there is not all that much that most people wouldn't already know, and the rest isn't too hard to figure out, and we could only just make out what our guide was saying. However the forum was amazing - without the guide however it would literally been a pile of old rocks... The basic picture was that the land used to be a swamp and over centuries people had bought in earth from surrounding areas so reclaim the land - so the land level rose. Couple hundred years ago archeologists excavated down to a level when rome was height of anicient civilisation. Think Ceaser etc... Basically it was really interesting... until I got sun stroke... we'd basically finished the tour but I just felt so bad. Rome was in the middle of a heat wave when we arrived - so it was a good 10*c above what we'd just come from... and i'm really fair so i have a really low sun tolarance - despite being 1/4 italian... We ended up going back to the hotel (luckily that fit in with our plan or I would have felt horrible :-S)
So I slept that off and we spent the night looking round our area, getting dinner from a pizzaria (it was like italy's version of fast food/kebab shop... they cut up the pizza with scissors...hmm)... and generally chatting/gossiping etc(we're not at all good at that... lol)Sat we went to see the trevi fountain and we did some shopping there. The fountain was lovely - really magnificent and pretty. That night we tried to go out. We'd asked a waitress in a cafe where the clubs were, and managed to get a vague idea. We went where we thought they were... and found none! we ended up sitting in a bar by the river which was really nice, apart from the waitress spoke no english at all... and couldn't even understand 'vodka' (btw its spelt the same in italian...)... so I ended up with beer because we knew how to say that... but jo persisted and thought she had a breakthough with 'ache(hmm... so can't remember how to spell it but it sounds like a-che...) which sounds pretty close to archers... as i'm sure you can guess it wasn't... it turned out to be tropical juice! lol hilarous Yeah we had fun :S
So sunday we decided to go to the vatacan - as the sistine chapel is meant to be free on the last sunday of each month - i.e the day we went. Another scorcher of a day I bought along a shirt to cover my shoulders in the hope of not getting sun burnt/stroke etc. Naz and Jo wore strappy dresses (there is a good reason that I'm mentioning this... just read on...). We decided to up to the dome without really thinking about it - we just got in this queue - which tured out to be a LOT longer than it seemed - and by the time we saw the notices about the 300 odd steps we had queued so long that we weren't going to turn back! It turned out to be 300 steps to one level - then more to the actual dome! It was amazing though! You get a really good view of, well the dome, and down into St Peters. Then - once again without much thought we decided to go up again to the basilica. Now there were a couple of problems here. The whole system is one way - so you have to go all the way up before you go down. The problems with this involve the fact that naz doesn't like heights, and jo doesn't like small steps - especially in a spiral and even worse going down. So its quite obvious that the way up (and for that matter down) involved heights, small spaces and small steps. However the view from the top was worth it (at least from my point of view - I've always quite liked heights :S)! The way down brought us into St Peters (which we *might* have got confused with the sistine chappel... but we had heard that the sistine chappel was closed - so we only missed out on what we counldn't get into anyway). It really is the most impressive building that I've ever seen. My photos don't do it any justice - not least because we were all shaking from all those steps and counldn't take a straight photo - it was so magnificent - the art everywhere is fantastic. Now comes the funny part (at least for me). The vatican has a rule on people covering up. We'd seen signs as we went in that said that you had to be covered up to enter. However as we went to the dome we unwittingly got in even though naz and jo were wearing strappy sun dresses. We were in St Peters and I'd just gone to look for something and when I came back I couldn't find naz or jo anywhere. I walked round the whole church 2-3 time (and anyone whos been there knows its not the smallest church ever...). It turns out that they'd been 'escorted' out by security for not dressing decently enough... they didn't find it that funny at the time but not many people can say that they've been chucked out of the vatican!
I personally think that it would have been more funny if they'd been escorted out by the swiss guards - picture courtesy of lightmatter.com - with uniforms designed by michaelangelo they look really really funny!So in contrast to our day we decided to go on a pul crawl in the evening. This is run by english and american people - mainly for english and american people
*sun - vatacan - pub crawl
*mon -park?
*tue - walk. AKAB
*wed - shopping
*thurs - hell
*fri - home!!!