As the Accademia (where David is standing) and at least one other museum who's name escapes me were closed today, we decided to modify our travel plans and head off to Rome this morning, as we have to travel back past Florence on our way to Venice, we'll leave Rome early on Wednesday morning and spend the afternoon in Florence.
Major bummer for today was that I managed to scratch the car trying to follow the GPS instructions to turn down a really (no really really) small street. A quick check of the website revealed that the insurance has $0 excess, so now I'm a bit less worried, I did of course have visions of having to pay a $1500 excess for the rest of the trip to Rome though, so we were both very relieved once we had checked the insurance.
While travelling to Rome it became apparent that the Italians, even more so than the French, have decided that the lines on the roads are only for decoration, it seems to be a national past time to drive along the lines rather than between them, this was on a 3 lane highway at speeds of 130km/h. French and Italian car makers should also remove the indicators from all of the cars they sell over here as it's a WOFTAM (waste of .... time and money) attaching them to the car, they're seldom used and on more than one occaision the wrong one is flashing when the car changes lanes (or moves from following one white line to a different white line).
We've now also discoverd that we shouldn't have driven the car into the centre ot Rome or Florence as they have LTZ's or low traffic zones, the hotels have sorted this out for us though, as you can bring the car in if you're staying overnight, but you're supposed to give prior warning....whoops! Kn owing this now we'll have to leave the car on the outskirts of Florence when we go back there, so we'll be packing the backpacks with the laptop and iPad so that we're only leaving clothes behind for the theives that will target our red numberplate. (yes the red number plate means we're tourists! something to do with us owning the car when we're not residents of Europe, clearly identifies us as having no idea which is probably why no-one has hit me yet)
Once we arrived in Rome and found the hotel, I took the car to the "special" car park and handed the key over to someone i've never met and walked away! hopefully it really is a carpark.
We then set off to find the Colosseum and found quite a few land marks along the way, the Military museum is really impressive. I've posted a photo taken from our hotel balcony that shows how close we are to the military museum.
The colosseum is awesome!!!!! it's absolutely amazing to see what the Romans built a very very long time ago, I apologise for the photo's as they really don't do it justice, for anyone who planning on visiting Rome, I have some advice "bring a wide angle lense!!" most of the sites you visit are very big and you don't have the room to stand far enough back to take a decent photo, the Camera we bought in Singapore is coming in very handy as the digital SLR has a lense on it that generally doesn't give a wide enough shot. All of the monuments and historical places are crammed in amongst the rest og the city, meaning that you don't get to stand back to take a photo!
Once we'd trekked in and around the colosseum we headed off towards the Trevi Fountain, which was soething that I knew nothing of but Carol was keen to see, once we got there I understood, it's and amazing piece of sculpture, and was definitely worth the walk. Once we'd finished taking some photo's ofthe fountain we walked about 20m and decided that it was time for some beer, so we sat down at a Cafe and ordered some "large beers", which resulted in 660ml bottles of Astro Nazzura showing up ;-), all good.
Once we had managed to drink 2 of these each we wandered (not in a straight line though) off to find some dinner, quite close to our hotel we found a restaurant that looked OK, so we went inand sat down for dinner. Carol tried her second Rissotto in Italy and to be honest I liked this one better as the Rice didn't leave an after taste in your mouth like the first one did, I tried a Spaghetti Bolognese which was really good. We decided that it would be a good idea to have a bottle of wine with dinner, which we paid for this morning, but at the time we enjoyed it.
Overall we had a good first day in Rome, the city is beautiful although not quite as clean as Paris and we're still having a blast, although all of this culture is really quite tiring and our legs are going to be massive after all oft his walking!!
Photos of the Colosseum and Trevi fountain and other Rome places
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