At this point I looked him dead in the eye and said. “I.Promise.” He said not to promise again and that’s when I turned around and finished buying my ticket. Despite the lady not having her microphone on at first, and having to tell her my age and nationality, it still took me just as long to buy the ticket as it did to argue with him. If I wasn’t already mad enough, as I walked away the man said “Do not lie” as I walked away. There are many things I wanted to say and do to him at that point, but I was in a hurry to meet back with my friends.
I explained what happened, and we put a plan together for the rest of the day based on what we had sort of planned the night before. We rode a bus and went to some nearby Catacombs. There are catacomb tours for €69, but the place we went to only charges €8! Even better was that we were the only ones on our tour. Turns out these catacombs, Catacomb Di Priscilla, are also the ones with the oldest representation of Mary and Jesus, which we didn’t know about. We had also wanted to go back to the underground city tour our guide had told us about in Piazza Navona, but my friends said that I should walk around the Forum and Hill since I already paid for it. I had thought about buying three tickets and just getting paid back, but Colin and Emily had ranked their interest in going in pretty low.
I spent about and hour and 15 minutes fast walking, with the occasional stop for photos or just to take in the views, going through that place. Yet I barely walked through much of the forum and probably didn’t even see a good 50% of the enclosure. What I did see though made everything from earlier worth it. If Emily could spend all day in the Vatican, or my mother two days for that matter, then I could’ve easily spent one or two at this place. I saw ruins everywhere, great views of Rome, a ruined aqueduct, and beautiful gardens. I met up with Colin and Emily who had bought a mini bottle of wine to share, and then we headed towards the underground city tours.
On the way there, I had to separate Colin from a handshake with a sales man. Really you think even with me yelling at him that we had to go and trying to put myself between their hands, he’d know by now not to shake the overtly nice man’s hand. I ended up grabbing both their wrists, both to get Colin to go and get their hands out of my face, and that got them unbound. I do hope I didn’t offend the guy though, he probably thought I was afraid of him the way I was acting. After laughing about that whole situation and a bit of teasing, Colin admitted afterwards he didn’t know why he shook the man’s hand. Maybe it was the wine (It wasn’t).
Back to the underground city ruins: we fast walked there, but unfortunately they were closed. Although they were by the art we had seen the day prior, so I bought a piece. Then to finish the day…Back to the same Gelato shop from the last two nights! “When in Rome…” Right?
Until next time,
Reed
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Read more from Reed at https://reedingatcolchester.files.wordpress.com/
To find out more about the Exchange program with University of Essex, visit http://studyabroad.uark.edu/exchange/essex
