Day 10- Rome

Trying to cram all of the Roman sites into one day was a challenge to say the least, that was (unfortunately) made easier by the fact that the Vatican museum was closed today due to an obscure catholic holiday that no one seems to know much about. We got all the way to Vatican city this morning before we realized that minor detail, but we were still able to tour St. Peter's Basilica and the Tomb of the Popes.

On our way from the Vatican to the Colosseum we stopped for lunch in a little side street restaurant and saw the Roman Pantheon. We eventually made it to the Colosseum, where we got haggled into a tour that covered both the Colosseum and Palentine Hill for 7 Euro.

Aldo, our tour guide at the Colosseum, was quite the character. He had very white hair, a tan that he's obviously been working on for about 40 years straight and he wore a bright pink shirt with a speaker strapped to his stomach so that he didn't really have to project his voice. There seemed to be very little actual fact during his incredibly long winded monologues, which consisted primarily of him closing his eyes and recounting what he imagined the gladiator battles to be. It was also pretty clear that English was not his first language so he would repeat a lot of phrases like “the gladiators were all big strong men, like Hercules.” He would also get stuck on certain ideas and repeat them in about 8 slightly different ways; for example he wanted to make it abundantly clear that gladiators could become very popular “after they won a few fights they might develop some fans... the more fights they won, the bigger their following would be...a gladiator who had won 8 fights might have more than half the stadium cheering for him... they were like today's movie stars...etc.” After about 5 minutes of Aldo monologuing on this topic, Sean turned to me and asked sarcastically, “hey Steve, do you think gladiators could be famous?”

Our second tour guide Jill, who led us through Palentine Hill and the Forum, was also interesting in her own way. She seemed much more knowledgeable and didn't have quite as many idiosyncrasies as Aldo, but I'm also pretty sure she took her caffeine trough an IV prior to the tour.

After Palentine Hill we walked through the Forum, then made our way to the Fountain of Trevi and the Spanish Hotel. Dinner tonight had its own little fun story, Sean and i each got an 8 euro pizza, a diet coke, and we split a large bottle of water. Needless to say we were a little surprised at the 32 euro bill, apparently at this particular restaurant sodas (which do not include refills) cost 8 euro and there's a 4 euro cover charge, @#%$%.

Tomorrow we fly to Athens and from there we'll probably take ferries out to one or two of the Greek isles.