Day 26: Florence, Rome, Vatican City and Venice

It's day 26 of our euro trip. Sorry i haven't updated in so long, Wi-fi has been pretty bad and i've been sick for a week now, hopefully be over it soon. Florence was really good, got to see the Leaning Tower of Pisa, it's pretty wicked. Rome after that, Rome was amazing, saw so many things that I might never see again. The Vatican was great too, the smallest country in the world, with only half a sqaure kilometre of land and so much religious meaning. The Colliseum was pretty impressive too, the walking tour we did showed us all the history of the area. We're in Venice right now, preparing for a long day of exploring the canals tomorrow, something i am looking forward to immensly. We have a gondola ride tomorrow and we'll be able to see all of the sinking city, including the area which was used for filming Indiana Jones: The Last Crusade! Everybody is getting colds now, the Contiki cold has hit us hard, but hopefully we'll all get over it in time for Austria in a couple days time. Our bus trips are quite fun, more so than i had expected. When we are late to leave on the coach, the last person to board is forced to perform 'Coachioke' which means they have to listen to a song via iPod and sing along with it, so they can hear the song, but everybody else can only hear them. usually this gets some hillarious results, and everybody runs to the coach when they relise they are late. I've already been forced to sing before, so yesterday when we were leaving to see Rome and I saw people jogging down the hill for the coach, I ran down that hill and outstripped everybody to get to the coach. Turns out everybody in the coach was cheering me on. Today we wrote love notes for people, who's names were drawn from a hat. some were very nice, others were hillarious and I'm sure from the content of some letters, some people might be thought of as sexual deviants now. Hopefully some new photos will be up soon, the Wi-fi here is too slow to actually be used to upload my photo's. Hope everybody is well at home!

Dale Chapman, signing off