Captain’s Log, Stardate: the other day. Just got back from a short holiday in Rome with my girlfriend and parents, and thought I’d share some of the more interesting pictures that we took.

Just arrived, cold and obviously thrilled to be in Rome. We got a tour bus and drove around in the freezing cold for a while, but despite the cold, some of the stuff we saw was pretty cool (no pun intended). After lunch, I dragged a comb through my hair and we visited the Colliseum.

It’s not as big as it looks on TV, but it’s still pretty bloody big.

It also lends itself well to artistic shit like this:

Anyway, there’s only so long you can look at the same ruined anmpitheatre, so we moved on. Near the Colliseum, we saw this sign:

Now, my Itallian’s not what it might be, but I’m sure that “spazi” doesn’t mean the same thing it means in English. Anyways, after visiting the spazi museum, which somewhat disapointingly turned out to be a military musueum, we came across a castle on a hill where Count Cagliostro was held prisoner, which is pretty cool.

From the Castle of Cagliostro, it was onto the Vatican. Obviously, no one told the Pope it’s pretty bad taste to leave your Christmas decorations up for this long.

I took some more pictures inside the Vatican and St. Peter’s churchy thing, but they never turned out. Never mind. They were sickening anyway. How the Pope can sleep at night in his solid gold bed when there’s people outside his door begging in rags escapes me, especially since the book of Matthew specificaly tells belivers to sell all their stuff and give the money to the poor. ANYway. Back on the bus, and driving alongside the Tiber, I saw this wierd looking thing swimming along:

Maybe it was just a bit of a tree, but it sure as shit didn’t look like one. Getting off the bus again, we got a bit of a surprise when we saw this guy:

Ray Charles is alive and well and living in Rome! To recover from the dual shock of discovering a cryptid in the Tiber and a supposedly dead singer sitting on a wall, my girlfriend and I needed a coffee and a glass of wine, so we headed into a cafe. What we were presented with shocked us even more than the river monster and the ressurected bluesman.

The bottle of Coke is a standard pound-twenty bottle of Coke, placed next to that gargantuan coffee to give you a sense of scale.

That’s the vino. That’s about half a fucking bottle, right there. Suitably hyper and/or tipsy, we walked to the Pantheon. En route, we saw this big wooden dude:

He has a kind of standoffish look on his face, so we thought it best to leave him to his own devices and move on. We arrived at the Pantheon where we discovered not only a beautiful ancient building but also what is possibly the world’s smallest McDonald’s. Ignoring the thousands of years of history, I immediatley posed in front of the McDonald’s and refused to move until someone took my picture.

Once we had taken care of the important stuff, we headed aross the street to see the Pantheon. It’s pretty cool, but sucks inside. Outside it’s an amazing example of ancient Roman architecture:

Check out the dude throwing the devil horns. Clearly a Judas Priest fan. Awesome. Anyway, despite – or perhaps perversley because of – the exterior, inside they’ve ruined the whole thing and snuck in the Jesus:

Way to ruin it, religion. Outside the Pantheon, there’s a fountain featuring this guy, who was just begging for a picture to be taken.

Leaving the Panthon behind us, we headed for the Trevi Fountain. Sadly, Anita Ekberg was nowhere to be found.

In fact, looking at what Anita Ekberg looks like today, it’s probably for the best that she wasn’t there. It’s a big ass fountain, not much to say, let’s move on. Still thinking about McDonald’s I suggested we go get some food and, joy unbounded, found another McDonald’s. There were pictures on the walls of the place with random English words like “friends,” “fun,” “enjoy” and…

“Laught?” O…k. We headed back to the Colliseum and were shocked to see that King Kong had climbed up and was chillaxing inside, sucking his quite sizable thumb.

He eventually fell asleep, so thinking it best not to disturb the sleeping gargantuan, we sat outside and I expressed my disdain at Kong’s ignorance by looking at the camera with discontempt.

Anyway, it looked like we weren’t gonna get back into the Colliseum, so we went back to our hotel. En route, we passed a hotel where you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.

Arriving back at the hotel, I took my hat off resulting in some epic hat hair and got into bed. Before we went to sleep, I took one last picture which will no doubt have the 14 year old goth girls knocking at my door.

R-Patz aint got shit on me.

So there ya go, an epic trip to Rome condensed into a single blog post. I’d recommend Rome to anyone with any interest at all in history or architecture, just make sure King Kong’s out of town.