Ah, Roma! I was just beside myself in excitement to get to Rome. As you can tell from my Pompeii post, it just thrills me to my toes to be able to see in person what I’ve only read about or seen in pictures before. I was most excited to be able to see the Coliseum.
To back up a little bit, I wanted to admit to a slight fear of traveling in foreign countries. We had been to England back in 2000 as large family trip of sorts and I loved it. England was very easy to travel around with the trains and the Underground, not to mention the language minus the terminology differences. It was the language similarity there that gave me a certain comfort level. What I discovered is that it is really not so bad! Italy was a very friendly place, the Italian terminology very easy to figure out, especially when you have a background of some Spanish. The trains were, like England, very easy to navigate as was the Metro, also like England. And cheap! Relatively.
My entire goal in Rome was to see the Coliseum.

The Coliseum (and Larry's thumb's up)
What was amazing to me was the amount of ladies who toured rome and the treacherous ankle-twister streets of the ruins in high heels. Just like this.

Random lady getting ready to tour ruins of Coliseum in heels. Yes, I'm shameless. And perplexed. My ankles hurt just looking at her.
The inside of the Coliseum. It was everything I thought it would be. I just loved being there. Also a bit bittersweet, knowing that Christians were martyred in that place.

They built a replica of the floor at one end over the ruins of the tunnels underneath at one end of the Coliseum.
I personally liked the characters of the Roman gladiators here and there to appease the tourists. Cheesy, if you ask me. My favorite part, however, is when you catch them with baseball caps on.

Roman gladiators and baseball caps. Good stuff.
Oh, let me back up, we stopped by Trevvi Fountain first, as well as the Spanish steps. Here is us in front of the Trevvi Fountain. It’s huge and beautiful and CROWDED.

Trevvi Fountain or Fontana di Trevvi (I think?)
And the crowd…

Very crowded at the Trevvi Fountain. Lots of coin throwing.
Back to the ruins at the Coliseum. We moved on to the Forums and other ruins. Here, we walked through a park-like area and saw some of the aquaducts. Chris loved that. Here he is under part of it.

Chris under the aquaduct
We proceeded on to other areas. We did not do a formal tour so I need to do more research on exactly what we saw. I think this is us in front of the Temple of Apollo. It was HUGE.

All the temples everywhere was very, uh, weird. Being a family of Christian faith, it just felt so wrong and weird and I was thankful they were ruins. The history was interesting. I have some reading to do.
After walking and walking and more walking through Rome, we decided it was time to catch the train back to Civitavecchia to board our ship. We really wanted to stop and see St. Peters and Vatican but there was limited time and foot power remaining. It would have to wait for another trip back to Rome. We really, really enjoyed seeing this amazing city and we know only touched the tip of the iceberg in terms of what we saw so we look forward to returning in the next five or ten years hopefully.
Next: Florence!