Rome Day 2

Ok wow. Observation one: my feet hurt.
Observation two: always visit Rome the week after easter, it's culture week and the museums/monuments are all free

Day 2: I started out heading straight for the coliseum at 8:30 to hop in line. Apparently the metal detectors were broken, so nobody got in until 9:30, but I was in within 10 minutes since a bunch of tour groups gave up in the 10 minutes before things started working again. Impressive...certainly not what I expect to be a place that seats 50,000. I mean, it's huge, but not in comparison to the stadiums of today. Next up, the Palatino and Forum, both fabulous...I think I saw the whole thing through my camera (I took 332 pictures yesterday). Now it was about 12:30, and I wanted to hit up the Pantheon before the lunch crowd got back out. I felt a little gypped. I had no idea that it had been turned into a basilica for christian martyrs. But, you could still see the eight sided nature of the interior and know it was at one point pagantastic. Following that it was definitely lunch time...wait. I lied...it was time to go see the Trevi Fountain...and yes, it was ridiculously beautiful. ok, by now I was starving and looking for a place to eat, so I headed back towards my hotel, snapped a photo of Triton, rolled on, found a corner of the Diocletian baths that had been turned into yet another huge and impressive church, took more photos and then finally found a place for lunch :) I decided to go for the Spaghetti alla Carbonara because I love making it and I wanted to see what changes I might want to make to my recipe...less cream, more egg, fresher parmesan cheese...and they use black pepper, but I'm going to stick with white pepper 'cause you can't see it. Anyhow, next up, a walk on the tiber and visiting a castle! The tiber is dirty, the castle Sant' Angelo was fabulous...I got a lot of good pics from the top. After this, I walked up into the Vatican main square, looked around, and then decided since the lockout at the hostel was over, it was time to go chill. All in all I had walked around Rome for about 8 hours and was tired. met some people at the hostel, chilled, had some wine, walked out to grab a quick dinner, managed my pics and then retired.