Rome wasn’t built in a day and you obviously can’t view it all in one either

June 26, 2008

We came pretty darn close today though to visiting a bunch of sites in Rome. The Norwegian Gem docked at the port earlier this morning and we caught our private tour drivers around 8:00am. We decided not to go through the NCL shore excursions and I can’t complain. I actually like these private tours where it’s only your family. Yes, you probably don’t get to see a bunch of exclusive stuff like with NCL excursions, but in Rome, we had two (yes, count ‘em) private drivers that gave us a tour of the city. They picked us up in Mercedes Benz minivans and drove us the 1 hr 30 min drive to the city.

The first stop was the Coliseum. It was astonishing and quite packed. I thought it was pretty amazing even though you basically need to just see it from one side and that’s it. But we wound up staying about an hour there. Rome is a pretty cool city and I’ve noticed that scooters and motorbikes don’t give a darn about the road rules. Everything is basically fair game. So if you actually ever drove in Rome, you are quite the daredevil, but they do have nice cars! After the Coliseum, we pulled over to look at the Circus Maxiumus. No big thing…just a big patch of grass. Snapped a couple of pictures and that’s about it. It continued like this for a while and mostly it’s all scenic shots. You’ll need to check out the pictures I took from Flickr to help see what I did.

Perhaps the coolest thing I got to do was head over to the Vatican and check out the museums, St. Peter’s Square, the Basilica, and even the Sistene Chapel! Oh damn…that place is awesome. Yeah, I’m not religious and obviously not Catholic or Christian…whatever…but the history and the art work in these places are astonishing. When will you ever have a chance to be in the Vatican anyways? Our awesome drivers managed to get us a cool (and hot) tour guide named Julia. Wow…and they have this system where they give you mini-communicators so they talk through headphones and you have an earpiece that you hear what they’re saying. Cool…and you’ll need to wait for the pictures.

Anyways, back on board. About to ship off to our second to the last port of call: Florence. Should have plenty of pictures to take there. Tonight should be fun with another Second City event and also the semi-final soccer match between Russia and Spain. This boat should be going insane.

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Posted in Sightseeing, Travel