rome, italy {part one}

For the past week, I've been trying to post photos from our vacation but NOTHING has been working. Our new MacBook Pro has been freezing up and I'm regretting spending so much money on it {if I see the beach ball spinning one more time, I might throw it out the window}, iPhoto decided to turn over half of our photos black {has this happened to anyone else? Please tell me you know how to fix it!} and Photobucket... don't get me started. Since everything is breaking, I spent hours saving our photos to different folders and putting them all on an external hard drive. Hopefully this holds up until we get home and have Apple look at the laptop from hell. Now for the trip post...

Since our Mediterranean cruise was scheduled to leave from a city just North of Rome, we decided to fly down early and explore the city. We flew Ryanair from Edinburgh to the outskirts of Rome and rode a bus into the city. As soon as we got off the bus, the heat hit us. Under any other circumstance it wouldn't had bothered us, but since we've been living in the UK for a year, we're pale. And used to chilly, gloomy weather {we will have to work on this since we're moving to the desert next week}. We dropped off our luggage at our hotel and went straight to the Trevi Fountain since it was nearby. Of course we both made a wish and threw our coins into the fountain. We can cross that off our bucket list!

The next day, we decided to purchase the Roma Pass, which included free transportation via the metro, so we hopped on and went a couple of stops to the Vatican. While we were walking from the metro stop to the Vatican, 10-20 guides standing on the sidewalks attempted to get us to pay a lot of money for a private tour. They claimed that the line to get in would take hours and that we were better off hiring one of them, but we declined and decided to find out for ourselves. It didn't take hours. The area was extremely crowded and the line looked long, but it went quickly and we stood there for 30 minutes tops. Most of the line was in the shade and we decided to use this time to take photos so we didn't mind at all. Plus we saved money and used this for a nice dinner. :)

The Roman Forum was interesting to see because this is where everything important took place: elections, trials, speeches, etc. We were lucky because we set aside half a day for this particular stop. We were able to take our time and view everything.
Oh, and we had a lot of gelato.