When in Rome, Part II

So what did we do in Rome? Enjoyed the good food, walked around, and rode the bus. It was nice to be in a bigger city and to mix with actual Italians again going about their own lives. We really enjoyed the hotel's location because it was in a residential quarter where we didn't really run into any other tourists.

We did get so see some of the sites. One day, we went to the Coliseum, which is an amazing and always impressive structure. I enjoyed catching a seat in the shade and watching the tourists mingle with the vendors and random people in costume.



Did I mention it was hot in Rome? Really, really hot and crazy humid. Though a little less so than in Florence. After walking around the Coliseum and then standing in line in the sun for 30 minutes to get tickets only to be told that we could not pay for them with credit cards, Jacob and I gave up the effort for the day and went to find a nice park to have lunch.

In the afternoon, we decided to make our way to a less crowded site, the Baths of Caracalla. They are some of the most striking ruins in the city and their architecture served to be the basis for the grand hall of Penn Station.



After this successful outing, Jacob and I looked through our guidebook, a Lonely Planet Rome that was in the hotel lobby and decided that we wanted to see the Apian Road and the aqueducts that were pictured along the road. We hopped a bus and rode out of town and did end up on the Apian Road. Unfortunately, the road is lined with mostly private homes that are walled off. We walked along its cobblestoned length looking fruitlessly for a sign of the aqueducts. After about a half mile or so, we came to a cafe and stopped for a quick ice cream and asked for directions to the picture in our book. The owner of the cafe said that we wanted to get off the Apian Road and head back towards town for the Park of the Aqueducts. On questioning someone else, we learned the photo was of a fragment that was located another 4 km away.

We decided to go for the surer and closer bet figuring a place called Park of the Aqueducts had to have something. We hopped on another bus, walked another mile or so through some dodgy areas where it was just us, some junk yards and some large guard dogs. There was one large aqueduct running through the dodgy area which was interesting but not exactly picturesque. Then we got to a metro which we took and after a 15 minute walk, we arrived at the park to find this intact aqueduct from the 16th century.



It was indeed an aqueduct....but it still wasn't the graceful arches that we were looking for. So we walked a little further into the park to take pictures and see what else we could find.



This aqueduct dated from 38 AD.



On another day in Rome, Jacob and I hung out at the river near the Trastevere area. There happened to be a festival being held on the banks and we saw Romans out and about enjoying the beautiful evening.



Our last day in Rome, we spent most of the morning packing to make our two o'clock flight. This time, we arrived in plenty of time to check in. And we ended up waiting in line for most of that time as the agents working the ticket counter for Egypt Air did not decide to start checking in passengers until 30 minutes before departure. This gave us plenty of time to change our remaining Euros back into dollars so that we could pay the visa fee for Egypt. (We knew from our research that you could get visas at the Cairo airport. However, we did not know if they would accept Euros. We definitely knew that they would accept American Dollars.)

After getting our boarding passes, we were then confronted with the problem of only having twenty minutes to get to the gate, which we thought was doable until we saw that you had to clear immigration on the way out of Italy as well, and immigration was much slower than security. There were no set lines, just a mob of people all trying to jostle their way to the front. So I grabbed Jacob's hand and wound my way through the crowd to get us through to the gate.

All of this rushing, however, proved to be utterly useless because in the end, the flight was delayed 10 hours. Through Italian law, the airline took us from the airport in buses to a hotel and gave us all rooms and fed us dinner. Jacob was very impressed by this service. I was less so when we arrived in Cairo with red rashes all over that I swear we got from that fleabag airport hotel.