Day 13: Rome

Hello everyone, Brandon reporting to you live from a chilly marble staircase in an old hostel building. Today was very cool, but left us very tired so forgive my brevity in comparison with Mary's posts. We first went to the Colosseum, Palatine Hill, and Roman Forum which are the main historic district of Rome. We bought passes a few months ago which allowed us to skip all of the lines which surely saved us up a couple of hours of standing in the rain. It rained in the morning but much to our (and the weather forecasters') surprise, it got very sunny for the remainder of the day after about 10am! We were very excited as this was our first day of really comfortable weather. The sights were amazing and we got several beautiful pictures (about 200 from today alone!). The first picture here was taken by a very nice German family which we met trying to take a photo of their family divided up, so we offered (in German of course) to take their picture together. After the photos had been exchanged, the young daughter asked in a tiny voice "Kommen sie aus Deutschland!?" Which means, "Are you from Germany?" I replied that "Nein, wir kommen aus Amerika!" We learned that they were from Stuttgart, and the mother interrupted the flow of our conversation to pose the question in English, "Why do you speak such good German?" We brimmed with smiles from ear to ear upon ending this conversation. This was truly one of the highest compliments that they could have paid us and we were happy to have had the interaction.

Our time in the ancient city ended sooner than we expected simply because we had seen everything and we were left with basically an entire day with little planned. We then zig-zagged across the city seeing many cool ancient sites, including the Pantheon, a very famous temple/museum which served many tourists (including us) as a resting point today. I saw many people nodding off in the pews and succumbing to the need for respite.  We thought "when in Rome," and caught a few precious "Z's" ourselves. Ending up in the large park at the north end of the city, we rented segways for 10 Euro and cruised around the park. We both really enjoyed our first time on these neat machines in such unique surroundings. We returned to the hostel to put some things away and then walked back in to the main city after dark to see the famous Trevi Fountain by night. This is a very popular twilight destination and we were joined by many other tourists. But after some fountain gazing and people watching we headed back to a restaurant in our neighborhood for a late-night pizza and coke. It was a very cool day, and a very long one; but tomorrow we have the same sort of schedule before us so I will be going to bed now. Buonanotte i miei amici

.