The Colosseum

I wanted to acquaint myself with Rome by purchasing a hop-on hop-off tour, the buses I always see tourists taking in NYC. For 20 euros, you can use it to go to all the major attractions in 24 hours. The first stop was the Colosseum. Having seen it in the dark the night before, I knew I had to see it again.
But before entering, I lose my tour bus ticket. Well that's 20 euros I consider a donation to the city of Rome.
The line to the Colosseum was enormous so I joined a tour to skip the line. The tour was 2 parts: Colosseum and Palatine Hill.
An older Chinese lady introduces herself as our tour guide and she speaks in a Chinese-Italian accent. "R"s are rolled and "th"s are are replaced with "d"s. Its fascinating.

She leads us into the ampitheater, bypassing the line you see in the pics. At first sight of the Colosseum, it definitely deserves a "wow" or "holy cow." Its amazing to me to see what human labor was able to do and how we probably won't be able to pull it off now. Here are some fun facts:
- it seated around 65,000 people and all were able to exit within 15 minutes thanks to the 80 numbered vomitoria (exits, or vomit, haha).
- gladiators were considered sex symbols and rich women liked to have love affairs with them
- it was built by slaves from Jerusalem and took only 8 years
- animals weren't fed food for 3 days before the fight, so they would be extra hungry!
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