Up early to get to the Coliseum at 8, then across the road to the Roman Forum before it gets too hot. (got to 32°)
Judith (our guide) had given us a tip to buy our tickets at the Forum entrance but then go to the Coliseum, worked a treat.
The Coliseum was amazing of course, big steps up to the top and you get to walk right around. Plenty of photo opportunities. And it was great that there wasn't many people around yet. I actually said to Jude it would be a scary place at night. There was a small piece of the area surface rebuilt to give an idea of what it would have been like. In some of the passages it reminded me of the MCG behind the members stand.
As we were leaving there's these guys dressed up as Roman soldiers, we'd seen them around the place before either on their mobile phone or having a smoke. Anyway this guy said how about a photo, so we lined up, not knowing it was going to cost us 20 euro for the privledge.
Lesson learnt.
And we got stung 4 euro for a bottle of coke (which is not as bad as the other day, one of the girls got charged 7 euro for a glass of coke!
Then we went back to the Roman Forum and got straight in, it's a big place! But over the next couple of hours we saw about a third of it and from a look out could see most of the rest, by that time it was hot again and we were getting hungry so we left and headed for the Parthenon which was great because they had the road closed being a Sunday and we could walk without having to dodge all the other tourists.
Before getting to the Parthenon we stopped for a quick bite, Jude and I had gelati, I've become quite partial to it, especially walnut and tirimisu, yum!
The bit of the Parthenon that is free to the public is the round bit at the front so you have this swirl of people walking around inside. The engineering and construction of these buildings is beyond comprehension considering that they were built so long ago. By this time we were all pretty tired so headed for the station, about a half hour walk.
That shower back at the hotel sure felt good.
We went out for tea a bit later, Jude had found a Chinese place that we thought would be good for a change, but when we went in they said they were booked out till 8.30 with tour groups so we went to this other place just down the road. The tour groups as it turned out were bus load after bus load of Chinese tourists. Good to see them trying some of the local quizine.
We had a team meeting back at our room to work out what we wanted to do tomorrow and surprisingly we were able to tick a lot off the old bucket list. |
Colosseum
Colosseum
