Blog
Just a load of random thoughts and stuff i've been up to, probably not worth reading...
Sunday, July 16, 2006
Rome (after)
Well, i'm back! Got back in about eight last night.
Seems like no time at all since I was posting before I left earlier in the week :-( But actually the four days we were there seemed to last quite long, mainly because we packed them full of stuff!
Had a well good time, but I have never walked so much in my life! You certainly need to be prepared to be on your feet a lot if you visit Rome. It was definitely worth it though, we spent two full days in the city itself and pretty much covered all the major sights.

It's a really interesting city, every corner you turn there's another impressive building or ruin, there's barely a modern building in the city! The most impressive area has to be around the Coleseum and the roman forum though. I never realised how big the forum ruins were.
On the first day we went on a hop-on/hop-off bus so we could find our way around the city and so we got to stop off at a lot of the interesting places like the Trevi fountain and the Pantheon etc.
On thursday we had a tour around the Coleseum and the area around the Palatine Hill which was well worth the money and really interesting. Again a lot of walking though!
Oh yeah it was also seriously hot! You can certainly see why all the Romans desert the city to go to the coast in August! It was a joy getting back to the hotel in the evening and having a nice air conditioned room to sleep in! Slept better than I have been doing here!
The hotel was really nice too, only problem with it being a little way out was getting back and fourth to Rome, cos the public transport, although cheap, stops stupidly early in the evenings! Thankfully though, the hotel ran a shuttle bus, so it was relatively easy as long as we didn't stay in Rome to later. Would have been nice to see it all lit up at night though.
We got a bit of time off our feet on Friday with the trip to Naples and Pompeii. Again that was really worth doing and Pompeii was amazing, way more impressive than I even expected, everything is just so well preserved and it's such a huge area too!
Could definitely have spent quite a bit longer at Pompeii because there was so much to see, but I think we got taken round the majority of the most interesting bits! Although we did miss the brothel lol. There was a massive queue to get in this place, because basically it still had the original paintings on the walls of... well, what the customers might like to try while they were there!
We didn't end up getting back til about 10:30 that night, bearing mind we got up at 5:30 to go, mainly because we were having an unplanned evening tour around Rome! We were planned to get dropped off at our hotels by the bus driver, but since we were one of the last, the english guide got off, leaving us with the italian bus driver who didn't seem to know his way to our hotel and took what can only be described as the 'scenic route'! Got there in the end though, so it was all good!
Well, there's plenty of other stuff to write about, but I think i'll leave it at this for now! Of course all the photos - about 100, are in the process of being uploaded to Gallery now!
Labels: Holidays