After a cold but restful night's sleep, I woke up at 7am to get ready for the day. I was freezing and so thankful that, while Miguel appeared not to have a heater, he at least had hot water for a shower. While I got ready, Romeo and Miguel chatted over coffee and I joined for a bite of what Miguel called "bisquits" (awww, Italian accented English words).
He taught us the bus schedules and how to get to the metro and different places from the bus. We took an 8:30am bus into the city to the metro stop Anglania, then grabbed the metro to the Colosseum. It was again rainy and overcast, which put me in a not-so-great mood. We walked around the entire thing, both mentioning how it is actually a little smaller than we imagined. We took many photos, with Romeo being picky about the ones he was in, and me having to redo several shots (begrudgingly). Finally, we decided to go inside, and got in line.
We had seen dozens of tour companies trying to coax people out of line and into their tour group. When a man approached the couple in front of us, we listened in and decided to bite the bullet and do the tour. We could skip the line, and have someone actually give us information as we went along. It also included a tour of the Roman Forum afterwards. It was 25Euro, (including the 12Euro entrance fee). We ended up waiting longer than promised, but the tour guide was interesting. Not sure if it was worth the money, but since it was already paid, I decided to not worry about that.
We took the iconic photos, and enjoyed learning a bit about the history and architecture. Did you know Colosseum is not the real name? The real name is the Flavian Amphitheater. (Well, I think it was!) It was pretty amazing, actually, the structure itself and how ingenious they were back in the day. It's still standing thousands of years later, through earthquakes, wars, etc. Incredible.
After that, we toured the Roman Forum a bit, which I wasn't too thrilled with, but, when in Rome, right?
By the time we finished with that it was almost 3pm, and we were starving. Thankfully we spied a little cafe type place, and we got sandwiches (mine sucked but Romeo's was delicious) and some wine. We enjoyed some WiFi (yay! Miguel didn't have any at his house), and just relaxed.
Around sunset, we walked over to the Trevi fountain and tossed some coins in. It was really beautiful with the sun setting and throwing some beautiful colors around. Actually, Romeo and I both had remarked that the sky and sunsets both nights we had been in the area were particularly beautiful and almost metallic. The fountain was packed, but we found a nice woman to take our photo, and we goofed around a little.
When we finished there, we walked to a hotel that we had read online had really good happy hour deals. When we got there, though, not a single soul was in the bar. Fail! We walked instead to a nearby piazza (which also had our metro stop) and got appetivo (buy a drink and get finger foods free). It was alright, but not too impressive. I sent back my bellini (which was mostly just peach puree) and got a margarita instead. I think the bartender didn't want me to send that one back because it was mostly tequila. Oh well!
A little while later we headed to the metro (and ran into our waiter from the bar, weirdly enough), caught that back to where we were to get the bus. The bus took 30 minutes and we were exhausted by the time we got back to Miguel's.
The next day we had decided to do the Vatican, so we went straight to bed so we would have enough energy the next morning.
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