Sheite Boos

Slept in this morning (7:30!) then began the day's Birthday adventures. Stop 1 was a walk to Trevi Fountain. What a fantastic piece of art. It's a lot bigger than it looks in any pictures, and it's in a plaza that's small enough that it makes it hard to get a picture of the whole thing. Then we threw in coins to ensure our return visit to Rome. Here's Amanda tossing hers.
While in the plaza, we had a delicious and healthy break fast of gelato. Amanda had coconut, pistachio, and mint chocolate chip. I opted for Nutella, tiramisu, and pistachio. MMMMmmmmmmmmm. From there, we bought tickets for another of those hop-on hop-off bus tours that we're all so familiar with at this point. The nice lady said there were big green signs at all the stops, the bus runs every 10 minutes, a great audio tour, and a loop takes 2 hours. So we rode for an hour and got almost nowhere, due to a pedestrian being struck by a car and loaded into an ambulance. We aborted the bus tour at this point due to the slow progress and the annoying Turkish family of loud cell phone talkers and unsupervised children that had taken over the bus. We walked back to the hotel to get our bearings, then walked up the street to catch the bus again. Stood where it looked on the map like a stop (it actually was), but there was no sign. So we walked up the street to the next stop that had no sign. Waited a good 30 minutes, no bus. So, we started walking to a 3rd stop, where the bus crosses its own path, thinking there would be a frequent bus.

Stopped for lunch at this point. Went into a small street cafe and shared fantastic pizza, grilled veggies (peppers, eggplant and radicchio), and some fried balls of rice, spinach, and mystery meat. Fantastic food. I could live in Italy for the food alone.

So we finally found the bus and rode it around for a while, riding past orange trees right on the street:
This cool looking fountain:
Many old buildings and churches:

and finally got out when we turned a corner and saw this:
Wow. Another moment of "pictures don't do it justice." Seriously. You HAVE to come here and see this.
Due to our pre-planning and forethought, we skipped the 45-60 minute line and entered the Coliseum for free using our Roma Pass. No words for the history you can feel in this place:
There's a ton of pictures to see. We'll show you when we get home.

From there, we got back on the bus, which has about 30% of the audio tour plugins working, and thought "What a crappy bus tour." Then some Germans came on board and sat next to us. They couldn't get the audio to work either. Apparently "Sheite Boos" is the German pronunciation for "Shit Bus." Awesome.

Passed the Italian Flavor Flav:


Back to the hotel and had a Birthday drink on the top floor at the fancy-shmancy bar that has fantastic views of the city. The tall walls are the Vatican:
From there, we had dinner in a glass-enclosed cafe on the street. Caprese salad like I've never had, spaghetti with clam sauce for me, "old Roman" style lasagna for Amanda. Fantastic.

Back to the room to settle in for the night. No turn-down service tonight? Sheite Hotel.

Catch our Vatican trip report tomorrow. Good night!