While on the subject of cars...

This is the adorable little Fiat 500 that we see everywhere. It is probably the cutest car in Europe. I thought it fitting that the Fiat makes the cutest and the ugliest car in the world (if I remember I will take a picture of the ugliest car in the world and post it too... I sincerely hope the designer was fired for it...).

F430

We were looking for gelato when we happened to come across this sexy piece of road equipment. This Ferarri definately gets a place among the sites we saw in Rome that day.

The Pantheon

What is this crowded place? It must be somewhere famous! It is! It's the Pantheon! YAY!

Actually it was pretty epic. That picture is light coming in through the open ceiling. All those squares in the dome used to be filled with bronze pictures, which would have been pretty cool to see.

That's me! We walked from Capitol hill to the Pantheon with about a hour break in between for lunch.

Capitol Hill

We walked up onto the capitol hill after we finished with the forum. There was a large square surrounded by official looking buildings. We wandered into one of them and found a museum. We explored an entire floor, looking through old letters, guns, paintings and statues from major wars all through Italy's history. I found that I really enjoyed looking at paintings here. I stared at a war painting that I particularly liked for about fifteen minutes before Schyler came and found me. We were about to search another floor, but we remembered that Rick Steves said we must press on, so we left.

The Forum

This place was too tall to capture in a picture... but is was my favorite thing inside the forum until...



We visited this big guy. I think this is where all the Roman lawyers met. It was huge though and I liked it very much.

Another famous Arch.

Some collumns...

That building...

More collumns...

And a squarish building with collumns in the front.

Rick Steves had written a little blurb about each thing inside the forum and if we really wanted to know what something was for we would look it up. I think it was around the forum that I started to hate Rick Steves.

Roma day 1

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.

The Colloseum

It actually didn't look as big as I expected... I think it dwarfed itself with no buildings close enough to compair it too.