Day: 6-7

Roma! Our favourite city in Europe. Our hotel was in a rather bohemian location (to borrow a Lonely Planet phrase as applied to our hotel in Athens last year..) but the room was brilliant and the staff friendly and helpful. And fresh coffee was made for us each morning in the breakfast room on a small espresso machine. Very nice.

By the way, Gerri mentioned that George attempted to muscle in on our vacation and throw the city in to turmoil (or so the taxi drivers claimed who wanted to take us to our hotel via Switzerland, we saw no sign of actual turmoil) and here is the flimsy proof:


Yes, that is Airforce One on the tarmac, and me without my rotten eggs. Ah well.

First order of business for the next day was to get my Italian phone card and mobile data service sorted out, by virtue of which you are seeing these posts now! I'd hunted through the TIM (Italian Telco) pages looking for information on obtaining and activating these. With the aid of babelfish, some amusing translation results were occasionally obtained:


Whilst this is good, I'm even more impressed by an offering from the other Italian telco - WIND. They proudy advertise an all-access service for their mobile subscribers, which delights in the name 'Passa a WIND'. Winner.

Most of the first day in Rome was spent wandering about with no particular aim except to soak up the city. Rome seemed far brighter and more glarey than I remembered, but as it turned out I wasn't wearing sunglasses, having left them at home, apparently. Hmmm. A remedy to this was found inside various Trattoria, which were not only considerably less strain on the eyes but also contained food, wine and coffee! We had lunch at one near some run-down church:


Next day we set off to realise one of our few tourist goals, to see inside the Flavian Amphitheatre (commonly nicknamed the Colosseum). Being bone-lazy plus having a 7-month old with us we didn't get there at 3am as recommended if you want to avoid the crowds. Consequently from the size of the queue to get in you could well imagine actual Christians were being devoured inside. By Russell Crowe.

When in doubt, spend more money, so we took a guided tour that promised to take us right past the queue and have us inside in 10 minutes. Of course that was 10 minutes after we waited 20 minutes for enough people to join the tour for it to start. But still there was something pleasantly elitist about walking past the swarming peasants, er, tourists waiting to get in. Vaguely imperial.


I also managed to turn down the brightness with the purchase of a cheap pair of sunglasses from a street vendor ("these Armani"..), although I will probably return home blind.

And so our days in Rome passed, and we prepared to head off to our temporary home in the Amalfi. In Rome you can get by pretty well as a lot of people understand a bit of English. In the small town of Praiano it will be interesting to see how we fare. My italian hasn't improved, the first time I tried anything more complicated than 'grazie' they looked at me like I'd just produced a stoat from my underpants.