Thursday (Rome)

Up early again. Ate our usual Ham and Cheese omlet and then headed for the train station. On our walk to the train station I met this nice old couple from Belgium. My mom's family is from Belgium and this couple knew where Hansbeke was! They were from Antwerp. We bumped into them the rest of the week in each of the ports. Anyway, we got our train tickets and headed for Rome by 9:30am. The train ride was just over an hour. Our first mission was to figure out what bus we needed to take to get back leaving enough wiggle room for late trains. We figured we had till the 3:30 train. So we headed off to the city center and found a double decker sightseeing bus. We figured this way we would be able to see all the major sights and wouldnt have to find places on our own. We did have one guy on the street corner tell us about his great tour bus.... if you would just follow me down this dark alley a few blocks I can get you a ticket... (hmmm sounds a little suspicious). We decided to go with the company I had researched online. It had an audio guide too which would tell us what we were looking at. Similar to the Barcelona bus we could get off at any stop and just get back on the next bus that came by when we were ready to go. There were so many amazing sites to see. We started in the Piazza dei cinquecento, went to the quirinale, the palantino and colosseum, the piazza san Marco, St. Peter's square and the Vatican city, and the Trevi fountain. Actually it stopped at a few more places but these are the main sites we went to. It was a full day and we were happy to be back on the train by 3:30 headed for the ship. Another couple and their cute little boy got on the train too. They were talking to each other and after a few minutes Ken and I said to each other...they are speaking HEBREW! This was the first time we had heard Hebrew in almost a week. We chatted with them a little bit (they had fairly good English) and found that they are not too far from Haifa. Small world. We made it to the ship with no train issues and it turned out it was a much better deal to go with public transportation than the cruise ships high priced excursion. We had a relaxing evening and nice dinner. The entertainment was a comedy show that night. It was okay, maybe we were too tired.