Rome - Day One

Soooo. Rome... Six hours in and I am not sure that I like it very much. First impression is that it is dirty, smelly, full of homelessness and busy roads. It's also humid as hell thanks to the rain when we arrived. We carry on anyway, find our appartment (which has access to a kitchen and FRIDGE - and only looks slightly like we might have our organs harvested in our sleep), dump our stuff, and wander down to check out the Colosseum.

Wow. Woooooow. The Colosseum is very impressive and has an impressive queue to match. We get jumped by a tour company- they give us extremely cheap rates and we go in with them immediately. We didn't mean to, we really had just gone to scope out the line, oh well. I am so pleased that we went in on a tour, I feel like we got so much more out of the experience than we would have otherwise.

I had no idea about the shade clothes on top of the Colosseum that were operated by a select group of sailors. I never knew that there were only 2-3 games per year, that they were free to attend, and that they were used as propaganda to buy peoples favor/loyalty. Nor did I realise that for every animal seen in the arena they transported three, as two thirds died in transit - often by the time they appeared in the arena they had been starved, left without water for days, and kept underground prior to the game, so by the time they were loaded into the lift for their grand entrance they were pretty much out of their minds. Poor animals. The Romans slaughtered animals in even bigger numbers than I had realised. 

While we enjoyed the Colosseum, it was very difficult to comprehend. Our minds got blown yet again. We decided to call it a day, then promptly got lost on the way home. Wandering through a rough part of town did little to endear it too us. We grab some takeout and eat it at the hotel with the aircon on high.