18Apr2009: Day 327: Rome (Italy)

We debated whether to take the car into Rome or whether to take the hotel’s shuttle bus to a drop off point and then take the metro in. I was for the latter but Chris felt he could find a place to park in downtown. We drove down and again it was a mad house of people on motorcycles weaving in and out of lanes. I swear I don’t know how these people aren’t killed doing what they do.

He did find a place to park and we headed off to the coliseum. It was actually free but we decided, or got talked into, a 10 Euro tour which at first I thought was not going to be very good as it was a guy talking and we had to all crowd around him to hear him. But a few minutes into it he got us all headsets and got us through the line to get in quicker. He did tell us some interesting things and showed us some spots where the movie Gladiator was filmed. He told us a bit of history about how the middle of the coliseum would be flooded and they had “naval battles.” It was later drained and a floor was put over the passageways for the gladiator fights and other spectator sport of killing animals that had been previously trapped for this purpose. They had a 100 day festival during the summer when these events would take place.

The guide tried to tell us we had to meet up with this other guide outside of the coliseum at a certain time but we didn’t do it because we believed we would’ve had to pay again for that part of the tour.

We left and just started walking around to a lot of different areas. We tried to walk to a lot of the famous sights that were close by the coliseum. We saw the Trevi Fountain, and the monument to the Unknown Soldier (picture here,) which was really grand. We saw a lot of different ruins and statues that we are unsure what they were of.

We stopped inside some random churches that we saw that looked interesting and found them to all be very appealing in that most had paintings on the ceilings of the domes or other interesting things of some sort.
We eventually stopped for some gelato and picked one of the busiest stores to do so. I guess because they have a lot of flavours – I couldn’t even see them all as it was so crowded. I again decided on mint with vanilla and got Chris vanilla & chocolate and Makenna a scoop of chocolate which she promptly made a complete mess of all over her face and clothes. She was in very happy mood after that.

She had fallen asleep when we were at the coliseum but was a handful before hand. For the most part, she keeps asking to walk, but when we let her out she wants to be carried. So we kept her in cart and she relented.

Then the frustration really began after our sight seeing trip. We needed to do laundry and we could not find the place that the hotel told us about. When we were driving into Rome in the morning, we happened to see one along our route and we couldn’t find that again. I mentioned to Chris that maybe we should go back to the hotel and then retrace our route, but he was stubborn (in my opinion,) and insisted going up and down this one street. Then he tried looking up on-line on his blackberry but couldn’t find one. So he finally relented and dropped Makenna and I off at the hotel (after more than an hour of looking). He left to find another place and I took Makenna up to the room and cooked her favourite noodles. A few hours later Chris showed up and we just ate a snack and went to bed hoping that tomorrow was going to be better or least a better ending.