When In Rome... Recap: Day 1 - Colosseum

One of the great things about Europe is you can hop on a plane and in 1.5 hours, you are in a completely different world. That was the case this past week when Waverly and I visited Rome.

We arrived in Rome at 9 in the morning and headed straight to the hotel. Finding the place proved to be a bit tricky. We arrived at the address I had and there was no name of our hotel, "The Mattisse" on the building directory. Dentist office, other hotel names, but not ours. After walking up and down the street some more, we called the number provided in the email but got the voice mail, in Italian of course. After thinking I had just paid for an imaginary hotel, we decided to walk into the building to ask if anyone's ever heard of the place.

Fortunately, after walking to the second floor, we saw the hotel name hanging on a big wooden door. We tried opening the door but it was locked. We rang the bell -- nothing. We banged very loudly -- nobody. Frustrated, I walked up another flight and found a hotel that had a front desk and asked the lady about "The Mattisse." She responded in an annoyed tone "You have to call them, they are never there, they come, give you the key, and leave."

Super. I walked back down and after some more banging on the door and more failed phone attempts, the cleaning lady finally came and let us in. She promptly hooked us up with a choice of 3 rooms, gave us a map and circled the places to see in Rome, showed us the breakfast area and then told us we needed to pay in cash, but if we didn't have it now, just pay whenever.

If only casinos and student loans could be that easy.

After a short nap (I had gotten about 2 hours of sleep the night prior), we headed to the place I was looking forward to seeing the most in all of Europe -- the Colosseum.

I can describe the Colosseum in two words: bad ass. It's massive, imposing, and you can't help feel that it's a good thing it's so badly damaged because it adds so much to its aura.



We decided to take a tour inside, and our guide, who's first words out of his mouth was "I am an archaeologist" was extremely knowledgeable. In fact, he was almost too knowledgeable because he would go on and on about a topic while standing in one place, and all I really wanted to do was walk around and take pictures before the sun sets.



Some neat things we learned about the Colosseum: admission was 100% free to all the citizens, much of the marble, iron, and stones had been taken from the structure and used to build the churches throughout Rome, and that it's actually possible to take 90 photos of it and still want to take more.

After the sun set, we decided to roam around Rome a bit (sorry I had to), and checked out the Monument of Vittorio Emanuele II which commemorates the unification of Italy:


and made some wishes at the Trevi Fountain, where, if you throw a coin over your shoulder, your wish will come true:


... but Waverly, seriously, no need to make a wish, I already came true... (sorry again, I had to).