When In Rome...

After breakfast, which was pretty much the same every day, (bread, meat, cheese and yogurt) we spent the next day in Rome sight seeing all of the Roman Ruins.
We started with the Colosseum. This was fantastic! I wonder if the author of
The Hunger Games used the idea of the Colosseum for her book.

Before we left home, I downloaded a bunch of audio tours that we put on our ipods. We walked around all of the ruins with these audio guides. Sometimes we got lost, but the information was always interesting.







We saw the Roman Forum.
Palatine Hill.



The Arch of Constantine.



The Pantheon.







For lunch we all had a panini. This is a flat bread with meat and cheese. Joe discovered orange Fanta, and wanted one at every opportunity. We even managed to bring some Fanta home.

One thing that was hard for us to get use to was "siesta time." This happened daily starting around 1:00 or whenever they decided to leave for a nap. Stores were supposed to reopen around 5:30, but we found that sometimes they never did. This made shopping and sight seeing kind of hard. The sights would open up at 8:00 or 9:00 in the morning and stay open until 6:00. The stores would open up at 10:00 or 11:00 and then close for their siesta. The only thing open after 5:30pm were the restaurants and the gelaterias. We found ourselves eating dinner at 8:00 or later every evening followed by a healthy scoop of gelato.

At least with this late night combination we were guaranteed to bring home some souvenirs.... one on each thigh!