First day in Rome!

Well, I'm currently sitting in our room at the popp-in hostel in Rome. It's 9:30 on Monday night here and I'm paying one Euro for an hour of internet (so I'm on the clock).

We got up at 7:30 this morning and had our free breakfast of a croissant and orange juice provided by the hostel. Then we headed out into the Rome morning with plans of locating the Coliseum.

We were momentarily distracted by a very ornate basilica (which doubled as a Gailileo shrine) but eventually made it across town to the ancient ruins of the Coliseum......only to realize we didn't have enough cash on us to get in. Since we weren't certain of the fact that we could pay with credit cards, we headed back out to the streets of Rome in search of an ATM.

After ascertaining an appropriate amount of euros, we headed back to the Coliseum. After waiting in line for about 45 minutes, we were finally inside of the monumental ruins! It was definitely well worth the wait.

After seeing all there was to see at the Coliseum, we continued on to the Palatine and the Roman Forum (which we had access to with our Coliseum ticket). It's amazing to think about just how old some of these ruins are and to imagine what they must have looked like in the full glory of the ancient Roman empire!

Once we had exhausted the ancient ruins, we headed back to the city streets and walked over to the Pantheon. This huge center of pagan worship had been converted to a basilica in, I believe around the 5th or 6th century.

By this point it was about 4:15 and we were extremely hungry, having skipped lunch and walking around all day. We found a reasonably priced pizzaria and enjoyed sharing 3 different kinds of pizza (a very Italian experience, if I do say so myself).

We returned to our hostel around 5:30, completely exhausted from walking around and being out in the sun all day. After about a two hour period of shower/nap time, Phil and I headed out to McDonald's in search of free wi-fi. Unfortunately, you apparently need an Italian phone number to get free wi-fi in Rome, so we returned to the hostel and begrudgingly payed our euro for an hour.

Well, I need to wrap up this post so I can upload some pictures for you to see on here before I time out. We're getting up early tomorrow morning to go to the Vatican!

Until next time, this is Ben signing off from Rome.