Day 27 - Rome

We got up at 8:30 and hit the shitty little feeding that they call breakfast at the Stargate Hotel where we're staying and then set out for the Colosseum. Soon as we got there we got nabbed by one of the tour groups who convinced us that for 8 Euro more (plus 10 Euro entrance fee), we could skip the line, have an English guided tour, and then at one o'clock have another guided tour at the Palentine.

The Coloseum tour wasn't great because our guide kinda sucked (didn't speak great english), it was also really loud and hard to here her. The Colosseum was pretty awesome though. It was crazy to try to visualize it seating 70 thousand people because it was in such ruins inside.

After the Colosseum we hung out for abit and then met the tour guide (a different one) and did a tour of the Palentine. This tour was really good beacuse our tour guide spoke perfect English (she was from the UK) and she did a great job of explaining the story behind everything with all the history. She was great. The Palentine was pretty awesome too, but really I guess it was just a bunch of stones and some half walls and stuff. Not much left at all.

After that we walked through the Roman Forum (right beside the Palentine at the bottom of the hill). Again, same as the Palentine, not a ton left, but still really cool and some great photo-ops.

After that we wandered around some of the other big landmarks in Rome and ended up at the Spanish Steps. We actually did the exact same walking tour as me and Faye when we were here back on the first day of the trip.

We got an email earlier from Dave Grant saying that he had such a good time with us in the Cinque Terre that he woke up the next morning and decided to jump a train to Rome to try to find us. So we wrote him back and told him where we were staying and he met me, Rob, and Anne at our hostel. We found a place to eat near our hostel and ended up there from about 8:30-12:30. It was a typical Italian restaurant in Rome and we ate outside on the patio/sidewalk. The servers were all young and fun adn they loved us and we got free glasses of champagne and a bottle of wine. We ended up drinking more than enough bottles of wine and had a great talk with two Irish girls who were eating there too and were just right pissed and hilarious. And if that's what all the girls in Ireland look like, then i understand why the Irish guys have a reputation as being drunks...haha.

We decided after the last bottle not to go out anywhere else cause we didn't want to be hungover in the Vatican the next morning. Dave was stupid, but really nice adn felt bad for us poor students adn paid for all our dinners. Great guy.