Contiki Craziness - Part 7

Day 7 - Rome, Rome, Roma

We awoke to a glorious morning and had another dry piece of bread for breakfast Italian style. The sun was out and boy we were ready for a day of fun in the sun!

As per usual we all piled onto the bus and were taken in Rome for a day in the capital of Italy, obviously the bus was piping with excitement. Nat our fearless tour guide, told us we could do the Saint Peters' Basilica and then the Vatican in the morning, and catch-up with another tour guide in the afternoon.

In Italy you have to have a degree to be a tour guide and pass some special tour guide tests and get a piece of paper from the government and council no doubt.
So our Contiki guide wasn't qualified to show us around town and if she was caught pointing our sites n stuff would be fined HUGE money, that left us pretty much on our own for the morning.

We went through the Saint Peters' Basilica which was pretty massive and you could tell all the marble in their was plundered from the Colosseum. We even went through the tomb downstairs, dead Popes n stuff...... yuck. All and it all was just another Church and wasn't to exciting for the captains, after we finished up there we took one look at the Vatican line(2 hours+) and decided to instead walk down Tiber river.

Captains Barboasa and Hook were in charge of navigating and looked at the map a lot, which was funny as I took these great shots of them, having a camera is great because it gets you off doing the orienteering.

Shortly after viewing the maps Capt'n Barboasa showed us how to cross the road, a large group of people were waiting at a traffic controlled crossing for the cars, having failed to see the red man on the traffic lights and fearlessly made the international stop sign with her hand, walking across the road with a sway in her stride and a grin on her face. Exactly how our tour guide had told us to cross a busy intersection, providing of course there were no traffic lights.

Stunned the three of us looked at each other as Capt'n Barboasa had just crossed one of busiest intersections and stopped traffic using nothing but their hand all the while a little red man was displayed on the traffic light. Luckily the cars were a bit grid locked and stopped one by one as they crossed, I'm glad they did, otherwise the fockers would have had me for breakfast, lunch or dinner one of em anyway. We all had a huge laugh about it afterwards and carried on our merry way.

After a short while we reached the river and I took some stunning photo's, Captn's Morgan and Hook were rushing it up to the Temple of the Vestal Virgins and the Mouth of Truth, where a few more photo's ensured, boy were we tourists or what. Then off to a cafe, it seemed to take forever to find one but once we had, we had a tasty Italian meal.

At the end of the meal this homeless man came begging for money and Captain Sparrow gave him a few coins and was rewarded with a hug, no one else gave any plunder. The homeless man didn't speak any English but he started making signs as it wasn't enough, so Captain Sparrow let a few canon balls go, it would have been the modern day equivalent to a cluster bomb. The poor man rushed away and the rest of the pirates laughed and cringed at the same time!

After that we rushed down to the guided tour at the Colosseum, the tour lady was pretty good and talked up the Roman ruins and gave us some interesting facts about Rome. After that we waited for our organised dinner. It was so HORRID I didn't have hardly anything, I swear that place re-cooked up the previous nights food, I would have rather bought another meal, far out. And then went to a tube station which was closed!!!! So that meant running to another one in the pouring rain, this was to be blamed on the Pope as he was talking that evening and attracted a massive crowd....

All in all we made it back in one peice and throughly wet, good old Rome a day to remember arghhh me harties, arghh, arrgghhh, arrrrrggghhhh