Rome - 3 (Colosseum)

Today was somewhat cold yet sunny. We went to the Colosseum area. As soon as you get out of the metro you have in front of you this 2000 years old beast: the Colosseum. It's massive and impressive. There are quite a lot of informative panels and interesting things to see and learn. Hard to imagine that this thing is still standing after all these years. Also hard to imagine that people came here for quite barbarous reasons, at least to us in this time and age. After all this walking around the place we decided to go grab a bite near. We had coffee and sandwich and of course it was expensive because we sat down (yes really, sitting down here means paying twice the price or something... dumb). Anyways afterwards we headed to the Roman forum and Palantino (which is really a hill). A lot of ruins in this area and of course a lot of walking! A lot of these places we heard about in history lessons and it's fun to see them for real. They are all quite impressive. Right now there's archeological work there so some sites are blocked off. Nonetheless it was educational. There was a small exhibit with the Chinese emperor terracotta warriors near - juxtaposition of two major empires in human history. We then decided to head to the Capitol. There was a Van Gogh exhibition but we didn't care about this since we saw his paintings already. We went to  free exhibition of some Italian actress from the early 1900s. The room was warm and that's all we really needed anyways since it was freezing today in Rome. We then went to the main building and some kind of exhibition on the Italian new republic and the Italian flag. It was more or less interesting. We then came out near the Plaze di Venezia. Finally the front of the Capitole - very impressive! Very nice ¨modern¨ building. We then walked back to the Colosseum metro and it was freezing... Came back to the hotel, relaxed a lot then went to eat. Took us 20 minutes or so to find a restaurant. There was one with a lot of Asians inside and the waiters were so lame and weird with us that we left! First thing they ask us is if we are tourists - what?!? Finally we found another nice family owned restaurant with Italian customers. Food was great as usual, wine was cheap and atmosphere was friendly. There's something about Italian restaurants and photos of Fernandel...