2/09/2011 Day 25. Roma

As mentioned I woke from my beer induced coma outside this morning. And we all came round to dry mouths and sweat producing heat. We headed straight for the pool to try and shake some of last night off and to try an make sense of what the hell happened last night. I don't remember many things so I used my phone pictures to help me remember, unfortunately a sole video to record the fact they played the crazy frog tune didn't help me and I don't think I'll ever know what happened or where we went last night. Ace! We headed into Rome at about half 2 hoping to miss a lot of the heat, it didn't help, I was dripping, I must have looked so attractive... As usual. We went to the Vatican first and had a nosey around there. We went for the Cupola, up 320 steps to get a birds eye view of the room below. The paintings on the walls, the mosaics, the statues were all brilliant! The decoration inside was fantastic. Me and Nick found another set of stairs which took us up above the cupola and onto the highest point we could get outside, we could see all of Rome from there it was great. I was soaked in sweat from the heat though :s I forgot to mention this earlier. Aaron didn't get let in the Vatican!! Because he had a vest on, you have to be able to cover your shoulders we heard someone say, and the fact his arms are covered in tattoos too! He had to wait outside for us to have a run around haha. We saw a list of all the popes that have been and the year they were announced, the list went back to 64 AD, very old list! So we escaped the sweat-fest that was the Vatican intending to get into the Sistine chapel... It was closed! Well gutted. So we headed into the centre of Rome for the colosseum, at least that was open. Inside it seemed a lot smaller than I thought it would be, but it was still huge! In the arena there is no floor so we could see what was underneath, where the animals would be kept and hoisted up through trap doors, they even had trees to move up for different sets, it must have been a crazy experience to go see people fight to the death. We read there had been bones found of bears, ostrich, hogs, wolves and other animals that would have been killed there. We headed over the road to a restaurant to get some grub, we were starving. I ordered spaghetti bolognese and the others had pizzas. My food came 20 minutes befor their pizzas we were a bit annoyed because I'd finished before their food got to the table. It was nice but there wasn't enough of it, I was still hungry afterwards. Aaron and Sam went back to the campsite at this point, me, nick and Dave stayed though to have a wander around and find the Trevi Fountain. That fountain is brilliant. The sculptures are brilliant, it's so weird how new but old Rome is. We got back about 9 on a sweaty bus and metro ride home. Chillaxing followed. We looked at the sat nav for the drive tomorrow. It says 12 hours, not an exciting prospect. We're intending to just park on a car park in the south of France, I hope we find it!! Goodbye Italy, Ciao.

PS while pre drinking last night me and Aaron bought what we thought was lemon juice. In Italian it said pompelmo on the front and as we don't speak Italian, we bought it. It was bloody grapefruit juice!!! I can tell you guys, it's not very nice!