Up and early for breakfast this morning as we headed to the Vatican early today. On the bus at 7:30am on the dot to go, no sign of Conner, but too bad as we had a schedule to keep... We find out later that Conner was unwell and had decided to sleep instead. We get dropped off by bus and take a little walk down to a meeting point where we meet our local guide for the tour of the Vatican, the Vatican isn't actually a church or a building, it's technically another country build on top of Vatican hill, the church's inside it all have names, but sill cover off a couple of those later. We made our way inside with our guide who gave us these devices so we could hear him speak though a little earpiece, I had always wanted to at least try one of these at least once on the tour as we have pretty well much seen them and every tourist site we have been too. After getting in and passing security we made our way upstairs and outside to overlook one of the gardens, before making our way to look at some statues. Due to the full amount of stuff we saw, I'm not going to put down all the detail otherwise this blog entry would be huge, but I'll put down some of the stuff I found interesting at least. We saw some old statues of Lions that had been take from Egypt and are actually able to be touched (along with a lot of the stuff in the museum). Statues of people, in order to do the faces they took a mild of the persons face when they died, from there they use to paint the statues, but the paint fades off overtime, so we see them today as plain old white. We continued through the building and headed past more statues before reaching the tapestry room. This room had only finished been cleaned on the ceiling and walls and we could see the amazing tapestries all the way down the hallway of about 120 meters. The people doing the cleaning of the room left little patches in their cleaning so you can see what has been cleaned and what it looked like without being cleaned. We continued though and found some other rooms with more art painted on them by Raphael and his students, I was able to pick out which one his was compared to his students, must be a bit of Dads inner artist rubbing off on me. Through these rooms we also noticed a picture of Sylvester Stallone painted on the walls, how he got on there they don't know, time travel perhaps, or maybe a an ancestor, who knows. Off to the Sistine Chapel next, the building was pretty nice, but well overcrowded, I felt a little squished in and really didn't feel like staying in there too long. There was some damage to the roof of the building where the pasted had come off which had taken some of the artwork off the ceiling which is a shame, but still very nice to look at. The Sistine Chapel was painted by Michelangelo between 1508 and 1512, while it took 4 years to paint it, when they came cleaning it in the late 1900's it took them 14 years to clean the entire room. After leaving the Sistine Chapel, we walked down a bunch of stairs and headed toward St Peter's Basilica where we stopped to say farewell to a bunch of the guys who were leaving to the airport. The rest of us quickly popped into St Peters Basilica, once again another beautiful church inside, it's where the pope does his big speeches from, apparently he will be doing a speech from there tomorrow, but we leave tomorrow so we won't be attending. We then made our way to the train station so we could go to the Colosseum, we arrived at the Colosseum in about 20 minutes, thankfully not loosing anyone on the train today. We want across the road to an entry to the Forum (essentially some ruins of an old Market) and got tickets to enter that, what a lot of people don't realise is getting tickets from there also allow you to get into the Colosseum, once we got our tickets we headed direct to the Colosseum, as we waiting in line I couldn't help but think we weren't really saving any time at all as our line was moving at the same pace as the line as non ticket holders, what I didn't realise at the time was that this was line to get pass the security checkpoint. Once we got past this point I saw the line that we got to skip to get in... And wow did we skip a lot of people, somewhere between 150 to 200 people, the girls called out "Thank you Sabrina" as we passed the crowds. It was amazing to walk though and see the colosseum and could only imagine at the time what the place would have looked like, only wish we could go back in time and see how it really looked, it would have been amazing. We looked around and headed up to the second level to get some better views from above, there did appear to be a third level, but for the life of us we couldn't find out how to get up there, it's possible that it was sectioned off as no one else was up there. During the visit to the colosseum we lost a few of the others, so after leaving the Colosseum the remaining few of us headed off to get a late lunch (at about 3:30pm) before heading into the ruins of the forum (market), very impressive as well. As we couldn't visit the entire thing we decided to just get a good view overlooking the entire place and then take a little look at some of the other things in the forum. We caught a train and bus back to the hostel before popping into the supermarket and then off to do a quick laundry load after dinner. Dinner seemed to be an. Endless smorgasbord of food, salads, peas & carrots, pizza, pastas, potatoes, chicken nibbles, chicken bites. A lot of food for a group of just 10 people now, considering we were 20 (counting Ronnie and Sabrina). Off to bed now as its been a long day and tomorrow is a 6:20am start at the bus. Might not get another entry off for a few days now, as tomorrow we head off to Greece and will be on boats for the next few days, not sure when I'll get wifi or data again. So don't fear, I'm still alive.