Vacation in Rome

Here is a short update about what we've been up to for the last week or so.  Its already past midnight here though, so we'll have to add more later...

We left the horsie farm sunday in the morning, and headed off on a train to rome.  The train took about 3 hours, and we still had most of the afternoon and evening to explore.  We followed a few of Rick steve's walking trails around the city and were able to get our barings and get a good overview of the central rome area.  We also walked down the big main shopping street and Jen bought her first big souvenir, a small winnie the pooh bear wearing a roma sweatshirt.  It is soooo cute! (says Jen).  We hung out in the piazza Navona, the Spanish steps, and the Trevi fountain at night, and got lost in a sea of tourists before walking all the way back across town to our hotel for the night.  On the first day we probably covered at least 3 /4 of the city on foot just in one afternoon and evening.

The second day we did our big ancient rome sightseeing day.  We started at the Palatine hill, and wandered around ancient Roman ruins for a few hours and then headed over to the colliseum and paid for a tour to give us some more information.  The tour was pretty good, but that night was the biggest free concert of the year, right outside the colliseum, so it disrupted our tour, but we did get a great preview for the concert that night.  The concert we would see later that night was Billy Joel and Bryan Adams, so it made our trip to the colliseum extra special with the warm up music in the background.  After that we ate a lunch buffet at a wonderful posh restaurant by the Pantheon and ate as much as possible, and then stopped by the Pantheon and checked out the best preserved interior of any Roman structures.  Finally, we headed back towards the center of town and went to the Roman Forum for more ruins, but only after a few minutes, they kicked us out because they were closing early.  We were also right by the entrance for the Billy Joel concert that evening, and there was already a crowd forming to wait to get in, so we decided, even though it was only 4 pm, and the concert didnt start till 9pm, we would wait and try to get really good seats because they said they'd be letting us in, in half and hour.  Of course that turned into 3 hours of standing in the hot sun in a crowd of people, and then finally they started letting people in.  Of course, the stage was a good 1/4 mile away from the entrance so as soon as people started being let in they dashed out to the stage.  It was quite a sight to see if you didnt get crushed by everyone pushing.  Unfortunately we got stuck in the gate that they opened last, and even though we had been waiting forever, we ended up with an only ok spot in the middle but a bit back from the stage.  We could still see everything pretty well though so it was all okay.  Though we didnt get a chance to get dinner and it was incredibly hot and crowded, the concert was amazing!!! Bryan Adams came on first and he was loved by the crowd.  A crazy italian man next to us jumped up and down for the entire hour set, all the way through.  Finally Billy Joel came on, and he played for twice as long, and did most of his hits, with his final encore of Pianoman.  It was an amazing concert, and we were sooo lucky that we were in town for the yearly FREE huge concert.

The next day, we decided to go to the Vatican, even though we were pretty exhausted from the night before.  We got there late around 10:30, and stood in a line to get into the basilica for way too long before we lost our nerve and tried to figure out why the line wasnt moving.  Finally we found out that it was the day before International Youth Day, and the entire place was swamped with German church groups.  It was the most horrible experience ever!!! Finally we budged in line somehow, and made it into the Basillica before it closed early, even though we didnt know about that, and found a free tour which was very helpful.  Then we headed over to the Vatican Museum and got through in just enough time to see the glorious sistin chapel before it closed. It was a very very beautiful site...

Our time is running out, so after that horrible day, other than the beautiful art and scenery, we spent today finishing up our sightseeing, and tommorrow we added one more day in rome and decided to take a trip to pompei and naples before we head to Greece.  That is our adventure for tommorrow, and we'll update with how that goes soon!

More stuff on Rome....

The third full day at Rome we decided to visit museums and some smaller sites that we didnt have time to get to before.  We started off with the National museum of Rome, which had lots of statues from Roman times, and other cool collections, including the largest Roman coin collection in the world!  It was a pretty cool museum with tons of information in english, so that was fun, and we learned a lot about Roman culture. Next we headed back to the hotel for a quick siesta and to try and finalize our travel plans.  We found that in Rome, the idea of a travel agency is really a myth, and we spent a good portion of the day trying to find one that would tell us how to catch the ferry to Greece...we were not very successful.  After our siesta, we headed to the Cappucin Crypt, which was probably one of the coolest and creepiest sites we've seen on the trip yet.  It was a few rooms in a church that were decorated with the bones of over 4,000 monks.  A few hundred years ago, some other monks were bored, and they decided to use their artistic talent to arrange their old friends bones in clever ways, making chandeliers, wall designs, and creepy statues with whole skeletons.  At the end, there was an inscription that said "What we were you are now, what we are, you will become." or something like that...It was CREEPY!!!

Next, we booked it down to the Roman Forum, which we never finished seeing, though we stopped on the way for some of the best gourmet gelato ever!  At the roman forum we finished the guided walk, and walked through the ruins of the Roman civilization. The highlight was the place that Caesar was cremated.  Then we walked up the big Capital hill, and decided we had enough time to go to the Capital hill museum, which has been a museum for 500 years!  It was pretty forgetable, but the rooms were very well decorated, and there were a few statues that were pretty famous.  It was pretty cool just to know that people had been looking at the same statues for 500 years.  Finally we finished our day off with one of the restaurant suggestions from Rick steves near the Pantheon.  The food was really great, but for some reason our waiter completely forgot about our order and we had to wait almost 2 hours to get our food.  It was absoluetly horrible because everyone else around us had already finished 2 courses of their food! And we were starving! It was very mean.  Then we went back to Piazza Navona and had the world famous Tartufo from tre scalini cafe which is this chocolate gelato covered in hard chocolate with other stuff in it and frozen really solid. It was amazing!  It made up for the horrible dinner. Then we learned how to be a starving artist by watching them draw portraits of people and saw some really stupid comedy acts in the piazza.

Overall we thought Rome was an amazing city, it was Jen's favorite (especially because of Billy Joel).  Even though we were warned that it was very overwhelming we found it to be quite managable and easy to navigate, other than the ridiculous crowds at the Vatican.  We had a great time there!