When in Rome

After I last left off we met up with our friend Chelsey Elliott from home, and her two friends. We went down to the Scholars Irish bar for beers and enjoyed having other friends to hang out with (one of the little things you learn to appreciate). There was no doubt we all had a good night =). The next day we got up and made our way to the Vatican for a tour of the Museum and the Sistine Chapel. Our tour guide was awesome and extremely knowledgeable about art. He’s also written a few journalistic articles on Michelangelo and others for National Geographic. We got to see Da Vinci’s Last Supper on tapestry and the best of Rafael. As they say in Rome, everything that is of importance or rarity is in the Vatican. That is why Rome seems to be half vanished. Every piece of art and marble has been put in the Vatican as a literal Storage unit. They have 86 corridors of just statues of all kinds. The Sistine chapel was by far the most breathtaking. It is everything that it is anticipated to be but you wouldn’t nearly appreciate it as much without the history of a tour.

After the tour we went over to St. Peters square in the Vatican City (everyone knows what this looks like from the Da Vinci code). We then went into St. Peters Basilica (the largest church in the world). It also is truly incredible. Mass was going on in part of the church so JW crossed it off his bucket list. The marble floor is incredible and the mere size is unreal. It’s something you can’t miss if you’re in Rome and its free! Afterwards we planned to see the Pantheon, Trevi fountain, and the Spanish steps, but were way too tired and ended our day early. We saw the Pantheon and Trevi fountain in the morning and decided to save the Spanish steps for later in life. You would literally have to be in Rome for a month to see it all anywhere. We then made our way to the train station to head to Florence. We had our first sprinting-through-the-train-station moment after buying reserved tickets minutes before it was going to leave. The ride was only an hour and we bee-lined for McDonalds once in Firenze.

Here we also have two apartments that sleep 4 each in an awesome location. Ironically this is our third experience with a faulty water situation. The last two either had awful water pressure to the point of dripping and one would run out of water completely. Here the showers only have hand-held shower heads in a bath-tub. Justin went to turn on the shower and the hose went flying around the bathroom. I had an ab workout this morning just sitting in the tub trying to hold the shower-head. We’ve now named it the shath.

I finally got my shopping time in when Justin devoted a few hours to escorting me =). Later we headed to the bar across the street for the Manchester-U/Barcelona game and had the time of our lives. Justin and Mitch wore their new Messi Uni’s and we had giant tubes of beer. Darrick successfully drenched himself in beer and had to go home. Barca won and we went crazy. After the game we went back to the apartments and more friends from school who are studying abroad came over. Once again it was so nice to see other friends, especially girls =). When we went back out the streets were crazy and people partying everywhere. Mostly because of the Barca win and everyone was a college student wanting to rage in the streets. We saw more friends from home back inside the bar, two girls from my sorority, Lou and Shannon! I was loving life. The party lasted all night and everyone was having way too much fun. Unfortunately Keagan wondered off into the night thinking he was going home and managed to find himself miles away. John woke up to him yelling from the street early in the morning once he found his way home. He made a record of 50 calls during the night, but it was another great story in the morning.

Today was an extremely lazy and slow day. We somewhat slept in for the first time and walked around the river. After only 30 min and a lot of gelato we all agreed we were just way too tired. Our Pullman bodies are now having a hard time keeping up. We took naps and did just about nothing all day. We’ve all made dinner again and agreed to lay low tonight. We have another train at 9 tomorrow to Interlaken where the real fun begins =)…. A few are going bungee jumping asap.