sept. 18.  2012

day 9

traveling with six people is no easy feat.  it also can get a bit pricey.  i think we’ve done a great job finding ways to do things as cheaply as possible.  so, that takes me into one way we’ve saved money…our hotel is 4 1/2 miles from city center, which we thought would be easy to metro in.  but not so.  the marriott is beautiful, but in the outskirts, out in the middle of nowhere it seems.  and the hotel charges 10 euros per person for the shuttle to the city.  so instead of paying 60 euro a day, we paid 15 euro a day to ride the bus and use the metro.  we have seen very poor and dirty parts of the city, which it doesn’t seem to get much cleaner going into the city.  we’ve seen homeless families sleeping on cardboard.  riding a bus for an hour, and then the metro for 30 minutes to get into the city has been very long, tiring, and really grosses me out.  but it presents excellent life lessons.  i think it’s important to see these things, to learn from them, to teach our children to want to work hard and be able to support themselves, and to be grateful for what they have.

so after breakfast, we took the bus and metro in, and came out right next to the colosseum.  such beautiful architecture!  we took an audio tour, which gave us quite a bit more info than just walking through, so it was nice.  it was also very warm, and slightly uncomfortable, so everyone was a bit agitated.  we took more pic’s, and jarom and i wanted to take the girls to the forum and through quite a few things, but no one was interested, and everyone was tired.  we knew with kids, to try and do one thing a day, so we started walking to look for a restaurant, and we ran into some elders.  so fun!  we then ate pizza, lasagna, and salad, after our gelato of course, and then public transportation’d home.  luckily the girls got in a short swim with jarom, and we raided the concierge lounge.  uhh, dreading tomorrow.  i’m just not excited about rome…lines, dirty, lines, expensive, and more lines…ready to leave rome.