The Capital City (Part II)

I am currently outside the Pantheon in Rome, well not literally, but considering that my last post was about the first half of my Roman adventure, technically I am just outside the Pantheon about to continue with a guided tour of the capital city.

Our tour moved from the Pantheon to the Fontana dei Trevi made famous by Anita Ekberg who danced in it during Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita. Our tour guide was one of the tutors at the school but I get the distinct impression she had never been to Rome. The tutor that lectured us on Roman history would have been a fantastic tour guide, but he was unavailable so we got the next best thing, only this woman wasn't the next best thing, she spent most of the tour reading out Wikipedia.

Anyway, things wound up there quite abruptly - our guide decided that the rest of the day was ours to explore because she'd run out of Wikipedia notes, or something similar. This wasn't a bad thing because she wasn't giving us the best tour we'd ever had and to be honest, I just wanted to do a bit of sightseeing without seventy other people in tow.

First things first, however, we needed lunch so Lynette, Gaby, Bree and I went to MacDonalds. I may have introduced Susan into our group but she was keeping one of Camerino's locals busy. To this day I don't know why he'd come with us, but he took a shine to Susan and they decided to go round the city together.

So it was just four of us in MacDonalds and we had two very different ideas about what to do with the rest of the way. Now I was getting on really well with Gaby and Bree, but it was Lynette that wanted to do what I wanted. We hit a bit of a rough spot with this. As had happened in Perugia, we got our wires crossed and the easiest thing to do at that point is walk away.

Now I don't want to moan about my coursemates because I'm still really good friends with Bree even though years have passed since we last saw each other, but sometimes you hit a rough spot with someone and in the interests of community relations, it's a lot easier to take a deep breath, wave a cheery goodbye and then meet back at the coach at the end of the day.

Lynette and I, two lassies from Manchester, started to get to grips with Rome. Our first stop was the Spanish Steps and then we headed over to the Typewriter. The reason for the disagreement with Bree was that she wanted to use the tube and we didn't. The very last thing I wanted to do was go and stand in a sweatbox like the Pantheon, but underground: on a hot, airless day like it was, the aim is to spend as much of it as possible out in the open. Bree maintained it would be too hard to get everywhere we wanted and walk, but I was sure it wasn't too much of a distance to cover.

Anyway we reached the Typewriter and headed down to the Colosseum. We'd seen such a mis-match of time periods and architecture during the day that it was only fitting we saw some real Roman stuff at some point. The road down to the Colosseum is long and so we chatted, paused every now and then and took our time to get there because we still had quite a lot of time left before we had to meet at Termini Station.

We didn't go in the Colosseum - it was quite pricey and I wanted to see a bit more of the city before heading back. We headed up round the back of the Colosseum, where I thought it was a good time to jump, and then we started walking back to the station - via the odd shop or two along the way.

We got back to the station quite early and ran into Susan and her new friend. We went to one of the cafes in the station and got something to eat. I wasn't very hungry - I never seemed to be despite all the walking and touring I'd been doing. After that we headed to the place the coach would pick us up from. Bree and Gaby were there after spending the day with some of the Portuguese crowd and they were full of what they'd done. They'd had fun - to be honest they'd not done a lot more or less than what we'd done, but they'd enjoyed it nonetheless.

On the way home I was thankful that Sunday was a day of rest.