Today you'll be glad to know I felt much better - but before I talk about my day exploring Rome and the Vatican, I thought I'd give you a little insight into what goes on on the trip besides all the sightseeing. After 10 days of being on the road together the group has become a little family away from home. The average age on my tour is about 24 with the youngest being 18 and the oldest being 31. All together there is 37 of us. We started on the trip not knowing anyone and while we still don't know everyones names yet, we know a lot of intimate details about each other. I personally have intermingled with school teachers, chefs, students, personal trainers, accountants, policemen, nurses, lawyers and engineers and even an astrophysicist just to name a few. Unfortunately I'm the only one from the Gold Coast but there are many from Brisbane, Melbourne, Perth and Sydney. We have two Americans on our trip, two New Zealanders and one Mexican. The rest of us are Aussies. The majority of the people on the trip are single, while we do have one married couple and a handful with partners back home. We've tucked each other into bed, done each others laundry, cleaned each others vomit, borrowed clothes, bought shots and taken photos for each other. Our trip leader is Ashley who is a registered nurse back home and a 26 year old from Brisbane. She loves vodka lime and sodas, french cabaret, roman history and dancing. Our driver is Scott or 'Scotty-too-hotty' who is originally from Adelaide but who now lives in the Netherlands near a windmill on his days off. Every time we stop the bus we play "I love it" by Icona Pop which is designed to wake us up. Surprisingly none of us hate it yet. We do a lot of sleeping on the bus, we also tell anonymous stories from the night before, DJ our way into night and we even did karaoke and did the Macarena in the isle of the bus after our night in Monte Carlo. Once we reach our destination we each get allocated a bungalow which is usually our home for two nights. We eat dinner out in restaurants with each other or sometimes in the site tent which is a big Topdeck marquee. The food provided by Topdeck is amazing! In Switzerland we were given cheese fondue, mould wine, and a roast dinner. In Rome we were given a bottle of wine, risotto, sun dried tomato chicken, bruschetta and tiramisu - all cooked on site. in fact sometimes the food we eat in the site tent is better than what we get in restaurants. We then hit up the bar, or depending on how big the night was before, the hay. A lot of us stay up in the bar just to use the wifi to keen in touch at home. We wake up at 6 most mornings and go to bed at 1am most nights which means that 5 hours sleep is standard. Getting your full 5 hours is considered an early night, whereas anything from 3 to 2 hours sleep is a moderate night. Some of us have gone a whole two days without sleeping at all. It feels a lot like school camp except that some of your fellow tourers are more than 10 years older than you and your leader meets you in the bar at night. A lot of the time it also feels a bit like a soap-opera when you're trying to work out who hooked up with who. The funny thing is this all goes on in between tours of the Lourve, the Colosseum, the highest point of the Swiss Alps, the Eiffel Tower, the French Riviera etc. It's all good fun though.

So now you know a bit more about the trip, I'll get on to telling you about my day. We started the day with a tour of the Vatican which I absolutely loved! I didn't realize a lot of the Vatican is about preserving religious art and was surprised that much of the tour involved looking at famous historical paintings and sculptures. And of course you also get to go see Michelangelo's Sistene chapel. Unfortunately we were unable to see the pope even though we were there on a Wednesday at 10:30 when he usually makes an appearance, because he was on holidays. After the Vatican we caught the metro to the colosseum. It's crazy because as soon as you walk out of the station it's right in front of you, big and beautiful and domineering. This then became a trend in Rome however. At the Colosseum we tagged along with a tour group and got to go inside. It was really interesting listening to the tour guide describe to us how the colosseum used to look and what would go on. Apparently you even had to purchase a little terracotta ticket to get inside. The after that we made our way to the Spanish steps to get gelato and to meet Ash for our walking tour. On the walking tower we learned that all the fountains in Rome are fresh water and that you an actually drink and fill your water bottles from them. We then went to a couple of monuments including the Trevi fountain and the Pantheon. We then went to the remains of the roman forum which are actually about 5 meter below the surface of the city. While the remains are still very important, they now are home to thousands of stray cats - so you can imagine I loved that stop. We also visited a famous gelato store in Italy that offers over 150 flavours. I got creme brûlée, mixed berries and plain yoghurt - delish! Then it was finally back to the hostel for dinner and bed!