7/1: The Colosseum!

Hi, it’s Kiera! Today I’m blogging about the day we left Florence for Rome to see our friends who live across the building, the Jags!

We walked with our suitcases across half of Florence’s cobblestones for half an hour and stopped at a cafe near the train station. It was really hard to walk because we had to watch Ryan only carry a small lunchbox, jumping easily up and down the curb, while me and Luke had to pause every time to pull our suitcase up, and a lot of grown-ups had taxis and didn’t need to walk, but Florence was really adorable.

On the train, I finally finished my first blog post and we saw a beautiful sunflower field. At the Termini train station, we got a taxi. Our dad showed us hotels he’d stayed at for work and then the taxi dropped us off at a luggage place where we left our bags. We walked from there to a restaurant in the market called bistrot enoteca or something, I forget the name. As we ate, I saw the Jags lumbering across the end of the alleyway with their suitcases, and I wanted to run down to say hi, but we would see them soon so I wasn’t allowed to.

As we looked for our AirBnB/apartment we passed the Jags and chatted, before continuing and soon after, turning back when another tourist showed us where our street was. We back tracked a lot in Italy. We met up with our friends again and stopped in the middle of a street with construction in front of a green door. Before we went in, my dad, Luke and I got our suitcases from the luggage place and walked into the apartment while the tour was ending. There was only one shower for ten people. Me and Luke looked for the other kids and I found them huddled in a tiny corner against a toilet and bidet. The adults also found us and told us to go to the bathroom because we were going to see the Colosseum!!

When I got out of the bathroom, I saw the kids in a closet with a curtain in the basement and a lot of thick sheets and pillows in and out of it. They called it a ‘fort’ and said we would sleep on some wooden shelves stuck to the back wall. Soon after, Ryan left with my dad to the Colosseum early because he walked slowly. Then we left and my mom suggested having walking buddies because we had a lot of kids. Mine was Annika, the youngest, Luke was with the other trouble-maker, Nitin, and the oldest, Kavin, was with Ryan even though he wasn’t there.

At the end of the long walk, we had two frozen waters and we couldn’t find Ryan and my dad. When we finally saw them crossing the street away from us, we got into the ticket line (the kids sat on the side) and it started to rain. Just as it started to pour, it stopped, so we got in the Colosseum together (see pictures), found out we were too late for our tour, and the Jags mom, Swati, got out her phone to read us the Rick Steve’s book on the Colosseum. Me and my dad sometimes watched the show before our trip, but we’d never tried the books. Kavin said it was like Rick Steve was on vacation with them. Swati led us through a big arch to the start of the space of where the gladiators would fight (the Colosseum was built to be a place slaves called gladiators would fight to the death from the 1st to 6th century and now it is just a tourist attraction). We saw the floor where the fights would be and ‘the Underground’ where the gladiators would wait for their fight to come and the animals would be sent up in random places much to the surprise of the hunter who would suddenly hear the lion they were searching for approach from the ground behind them. There were also tours of the Underground but Swati said they were 2 and a half hours.

After we studied the arena and I took some panoramas on my mom’s phone, we went to the left to see some stalls that my dad thought were some of the gladiators’ locker rooms (kind of). We climbed onto a sort of fence there and took a lot of pictures before the cleaners told us to get off of it as a sign clearly stated in only English and Italian.

It was really cool seeing the Colosseum because we had never been out of North America so all the famous buildings were less than 400 years old and now we could see things from 2,000 years ago!

Sorry, this is unfinished, my mom had to post it so she could post the later ones because I was too slow. I'll try to finish it when I have time.