Rome

ROMA! Ok today is going to be nuts. We are starting off with a guided tour of the Vatican which will take about two hours and then we have a free day with which I’m going to see as much of Rome as I can. SPOILER ALERT: I get home at 10:30pm tonight with blisters on my feet. IDIOT ALERT: I was wearing knock-off crocs that I bought at a service station.

Let’s start at the Vatican because that’s where we started.

This is the entrance. Seems fitting. The line to get in the door goes around the building and out of sight. Being in a group and paying for a guided tour gets us past everyone – it’s worth it. We are told that the Vatican museum is the largest museum in the world – It spans 7 kilometers and 1300 rooms. We soon learn that they weren’t lying. Walking around Vatican city was one of the most overwhelming things I’ve ever done. Not from the heat or the size but from the magnitude and significance of the information. It was mind-numbing. I took some pictures although they don’t do the experience justice.

This is our guide Marilina. She described her name as Marilyn with an “ah” at the end. Of *course* there’s an “ah” at the end! On the right is a statue’s best interpretation of how I felt at this point in the tour. Next we go into the Sistine Chapel which I can’t show you because God said so. After that we head into St. Peter’s Basilica which is huge and filled with amazing things. I had the same problem with this tour guide as I had with the one in Venice: The accent made it very hard to understand her and absorb the things she was saying. So all I can give you are pictures, no background. Sorry.

After the Vatican tour Greg took us to a pizza shop around the corner where you pay by weight. They are giant square pizzas of all varieties and you just tell them what size squares to cut from each one and they dice it up and weigh it. It was awesome. Then of course I had an espresso and started off for the rest of my day. My goals: The Coliseum, Bone Church, Pantheon, Leonardo Davinci exhibit. Here is how it all played out:

After getting separated from some people while crossing the street (I don’t know - I guess I’m 5 now), I took the metro to the Coliseum and met up with some other people. We paid for a guide because they help you skip the line and he also spoke to us for 45 minutes about the history of the Coliseum which was interesting. Post continues after the jump…

The middle photo here is Constantine’s Arch but taking a picture of an arch is like taking a picture of the trees beyond the arch so this is a picture of the side instead. The photo on the right is of some ruins from the Roman Forum.

Next stop is the Pantheon and the walk will take us past the Victor Emmanuel monument - a monument to honor Victor Emmanuel, the first king of Italy. We walk everywhere in Rome because there is so much to see and also the bus schedule is in Italian. The interesting thing about the this monument is that it was built with such bright white stone and it’s so huge that during World War I it was used as a reference point for bombers and subsequently was never harmed in any attacks. It’s still as huge and bright as ever. If I’m not a good enough reference point, the platform that the horse is standing on is the size of a 20-person dinner table if each person had already eaten 20 dinners. I may have that stat wrong but it’s tremendous.

Then the Pantheon. The Pantheon is free admission (unlike most buildings in Rome) but some idiot tried to charge us 1 Euro to walk up the side steps instead of the front steps. Love it. So after we all paid him I took some pics of the hole in the roof because I think that’s all it’s famous for. You can tell I’m getting tired.

After the Pantheon we stopped at a gelato place on our way to the DaVinci exhibit. It was heavily guarded so we had to go somewhere else.

The DaVinci exhibit was brilliant. Some scholars and craftsmen from around Italy built a bunch of his sketches to scale using materials from his day. I swear this guy was an alien. No person can be this unbelievably talented and intelligent without being an alien. He had drawings in his notebooks on everything from human physiology to ball bearings to wooden tanks to flying machines. There wasn’t any topic that he wasn’t exploring or theorizing about and most of it was centuries ahead of it’s time. I spent almost two hours here before I met up with some people for dinner.

Dinner was more delicious Italian food finished with probably the best Tiramasu I’ve ever had.

I never made it to the Bone Church because they closed at six and I spent too long with DaVinci. Oh well. I don’t understand where bones are going that they need to close at six but whatever.

Then my adventure home:

The last Contiki bus to the hotel was picking everyone up from the train station at 8:30 so we headed for the subway around 7:30. The subway station was under construction or we’re just retarded so we were routed halfway across town (underground) to a bus terminal nowhere near the subway we needed. By this time it was 8pm and we still can’t read Italian so we skip the city buses and walk to the nearest subway station and hop the subway. After finally getting to the train station which will take us to our Contiki bus, it’s 8:45 and we’ve missed the last pickup. The train is scheduled to come at 9:06 but shows up at 9:36 and we get to our hotel train station at 10pm. Our hotel is a 30 minute walk from the train station (which is why the Contiki bus was offering pickups) so we finally got home at 10:30. I was laughing most of the way because we had walked for like 12 straight hours already and I was wearing knock-off crocs that I bought at a service station. Did you follow all of that? Me either. I missed the bus.

That was the end of a very long, very hot, very awesome, very wordy Day 9.

I’m still a day behind (Florence) and we just got to Nice so pretty soon I’ll be two days behind. Tomorrow it might rain so I’ll catch up then. If it doesn’t rain I’ll be at the beach. Ciao!