We took a bus into Roma early the next day after the first really refreshing nights sleep in a long while. The bus stop was right outside the entrance to Roma plus Camping and we stood their waiting, armed only with Rick Steves and our Roma passes (which cost twenty Euro and paid for all travel by any public means inside Rome and entrance to two major sites for free. Boo-yay). We got off the bus at the last stop and headed down into the Metro and rode it in the wrong direction for only one stop before switching trains and arriving at "Colloseo." The stop for the Colloseum. Our the entrance of the Metro we were instantly bombarded with people trying to offer us tours. I had perfected my blank stare into space by this point, but Liesl was accosted by a woman tour guide and I had to go back into the crowd and drag her away (I didn't literally have to do this, but it was much funnier when I did).
The colloseum looked very old and stone and tall. It also looked like the entire western world was trying to get in the front doors. We descovered that... not only did our Roma passes get us into the colloseum for free (saving us twelve Euro) it also let us skip the line (take that tour guides! Especially the angry one that yelled "Fine! You wait in line for two hour!"). Walked past that huge line of people was probably the best experience I had in Rome.
We toured around the Colloseum for a couple hours, looking at displays of gladiators' armor and chunks of animal bone and that sort of stuff.
Who would not want their picture taken with one of these guys outside the colloseum? I wonder what they do at parties. "Hey, I'm an engineer. What do you do?" "Oh... I dress up in Roman costumes and take pictures with tourists for money outside the colloseum. I don't earn much, but you know... I just gotta follow my dreams." Hmm... actually I bet they just don't get invited to parties.
This was a famous arch of someone that was built because he did something famous. I took a picture of it from the colloseum. It was cool, but I didn't get to look very closely at it when I was walking by because they had the really big badly fitting cobblestones around it and I had to pay a lot of attention to my feet to keep from falling down. Rick Steves told us to go the the forum next... and we tried for about an hour. During this period the first picture in this post happened. One of the best things about Rome were the free water fountains everywhere. Eventually we did find the real entrance and went in.
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