Act I, Scene 2: Sammy meets his long-lost father.

First order of business: go to the Colosseum. Not because it is the most important thing to see or anything, but because it is within walking distance of the hotel. We stop by a tourist information, get our third map and start heading towards a park that is adjacent to the Colosseum. The park had plenty of sleepy bums in it. I felt like some sleeping myself. We start heading down towards this ancient arena and are approached by a girl, asking us if we would like to join a guided English tour of the Colosseum. Well, we declined, as we wanted to check things out first and didn't know if the price she said was okay or whatnot. But how nice, and what a coincidence. At least that's what I thought until the next person asks us the same thing 2 minutes later. And then another just after that. And they were always like 'It starts right now, you gotta decide now' and didn't wanna reveal when the next tour would be or how often they offer tours. One guy actually told us they were two English tours a day. What a bunch of bull. There was an English tour every 5 minutes I would say, as almost everybody there did not know Italian. We decided to save the Colosseum for later and headed over to the Forum and Palace instead. The ticket line there was significantly shorter, and the tickets you buy are good for the palace and the Colosseum. They were 10 Euro still, that's what the guided tour people said, and they would charge an extra 8 for the tour, which also included the Forum and some things outsdide the Colosseum. So it wasn't a bad deal after all. But we decide to look at the Palace first.
Most of those buildings are of course ruins. And you can only guess how big they must have been in their time. After the palace it was time for the Colosseum then, where we were approached by another person offering a tour, well 3 more, but the first one reduced the price for the tour to 6 as we already had tickets to get in. But we didn't want a tour, so we just ignored the rest of them. We figured 10 Euro was enough to see it, and we knew some things about it already, and combined that with what we know about the Amphitheater in Trier and nuclear physics. Good enough. After that it was time for a short rest, which we used to buy frozen bottled water. We knew we would need more soon.
It was time to check out the buses and underground trains to see how we could get around. And that's where our troubles began. The bus stops tell you which lines stop there, and which other stops they stop at. Where are those stops located in comparison to where we wanna go? No info. What time do they go? They only tell the time of the first and last bus. A map of the lines and how they run? No info. So I bought a map with the bus lines on it inside the metro station. I looked at it and figured it out. Or so I thought. In order to find a bus that would take us to the Pantheon and the Piazza Navona, I would have to look on the map to see what lines go to the place we were at at the moment. Then I would have to guess where a stop might be close to where we wanna go, and compare the list of bus lines that go there, with the list of bus lines at the current location.