Yes, citizens, plumbing! It's the latest invention to hit Rome! It's astounding, it's amazing! Get on the bandwagon!

5 March-8 March 2009

Thursday after class, my friend Julia drove Kyle and I to Dusseldorf where we jumped on a train to our airport. We were on our way to Rome!!! Unfortunately, our flight got delayed an hour and a half, but we eventually got there. We arrived in the ancient city and found our hostel. We dumped our stuff, grabbed some Mickey D’s (I know, I know…but it was the only thing open!), and then went to sleep. I was so excited I couldn’t sleep very well, but we got up at 6:30am the next day anyway because there is SO much to see in Rome and we didn’t want to miss anything.

We headed over to St. Peter’s first to start our day because we heard that it gets crazy crowded over there as the day goes on. Thank goodness, too, because we got right into the church with no line whatsoever. What a beautiful, breathtaking place! All the bronze was taken from the Pantheon and even though it looks really delicate in there, it’s about 2 tons of bronze! Crazy, huh? The Pieta is in there, and I am an idiot and didn’t really get a good look at it. I feel so DUMB about that, but it is what it is. I was too blown away by the church itself I guess…bummer, though.

Afterward, we got approached by a guy on the street asking us if we wanted to do a guided tour of St. Peter’s and the Vatican Museums. We were skeptical at first because it seems weird to be approached like that, but we agreed. Thank goodness we did! Our tour guide’s name was either Michelangelo or Matteo (he was introduced as both by different guys bringing people in) and he was AWESOME. He was so knowledgeable on everything about St. Peter’s and all the art inside the Vatican Museums. It was AMAZING. The tour was really long and he explained everything so well and in such an entertaining way. I really enjoyed it. And the Vatican Museums have some incredible stuff in there. The four rooms of Raphael are incredible. I had no idea that Raphael invented the vivid colors in paint. He was the first put arsenic in his colors to make them more vivid. Unfortunately it made him go blind by the time he died because the paint would drip in his eyes occasionally when he was painting ceilings and walls and stuff. It’s probably also why he died so young. How sad. His paintings are unbelievable. Really. The Sistine Chapel was smaller than I expected it to be, but it was still just amazing to see the ceiling and the walls. My favorite wall was the Last Judgment because I feel like you can really see Michelangelo’s thought processes when you look at it. It’s so cool.

We got out of the tour around 1:00 and followed the secret passageway wall from Vatican City to the castle of Saint Angelo where the pope used to hide when the Vatican was threatened. It’s right on the River Tiber and it’s really neat to see. After that, we walked past the Ara Pacis where the Roman returning generals would stop to pay their respect to peace on their way back into Rome from battles, and headed toward the Spanish Steps. We climbed the Spanish Steps and took in the view from the top and then we headed for the Colleseum.

What an amazing thing that Colleseum is!!! Wow is all you can say when you see it. It’s absolutely breathtaking to see this huge structure that you know has been there for ages. It was hard to believe that I was really looking at the colleseum. We went around to the Forum after that and tried to get in, but all the doors were locked. By the time we found the ticket counter, we realized that both the Colleseum and the Forum close at 4:30 during the slow season, and so we couldn’t get in to either. BUMMER. We did see them both, though, and we thought we’d try again on Sunday morning.

After the Colleseum and Forum, we headed back to the hostel for the pasta dinner that is included in our room price. We ate and then kind of just chilled out (we’d been up since 6:30 walking all around the city! We were exhausted.) We found a small grocery store and bought some apples and Special K bars to eat the next day, because bright and early Saturday we were heading to Pompeii!!!

That morning we got up and went to the train station. The train to Pompeii took about 3 hours, but it was SO worth it. Pompeii is by far the coolest place I have been in Europe. The volcanic ash preserved a lot of the place so well that you can still see the murals and paintings on the walls of people’s houses. It’s just so incredible. It’s also a whole lot bigger than I expected it to be. It’s a real city. I mean, I should have expected that knowing that 12,000 people lived and died there, but still. The cool thing about Pompeii is that they let you just wander around in there. There are some places that they rope off, but it’s not like there are guards wandering around. They really trust people to do the right thing in there. And it’s SO neat. It’s like wandering around a museum where you’re allowed to walk on the exhibits and really examine stuff closely and everything. It’s so awesome!!! The Villa of the Mysteries was so well preserved and it was just awesome to see the way people really lived. We also saw a few of the casts of people that the archaeologists make when they find the people-shaped holes in the ground. We saw the amphitheatre, which is the oldest in the world (built in 80 BC), the tombs, the temples, the forum….it was all so awesome. I could hardly contain my excitement the whole time we were there.

After Pompeii, we got on the train back to Naples where we’d pick up the train to Rome. Our train got cancelled back to Rome and so we had to spend an hour and a half in the Naples train station. NOT the world’s most comfortable place, I’ll tell you. Naples is apparently the seat of the Italian mafia these days and the train station was not the most inviting place on earth. Haha…I was approached by 3 or 4 different guys, only one of whom was homeless who just wanted to talk to me. I don’t know what they wanted, but it really made me uncomfortable. Ick. When we got back to Rome, we just had dinner and went to bed because we were exhausted after getting up early and walking all day again.

Sunday morning, we got up again at 6:30 and headed to the Pantheon. We finally got there around 8:30, and it didn’t open until 9. We didn’t want to wait because we had to be heading back around 10 to catch our plane, so we just went to the Trevi Fountain, Barbarini Square, and then over to the Circus Maximus. From the Circus Maximus, we walked to the Forum and the Colleseum again to see if we could get in, but it was going to take another 40 minutes and we only had 20 left before we had to go catch our bus to the airport. So unfortunately, I never got into the forum or the colleseum in Rome, but I saw both. I don’t feel too awful about that, though, because I did see Pompeii and what I saw there was so much better preserved than it would have been in Rome. I hope I can get back there before I leave and see those things, but if I don’t, I have something that will still be new the next time I go there.

All in all, Rome was AMAZING. Pompeii was even more incredible, and I want to go back there and spend a full twelve hours exploring because there was just so much to see and I want to experience all that history completely.