Oh The Places We’ll Go

After having to change our plans, going to Torino instead of leaving for Spain on Friday, we are back in Milan with 6 hours or so to kill before getting on an overnight train headed to Barcelona.  We haven’t done much of anything for the last few days, mostly because everything is closed around here for the Italians vacationing in much nicer places with better weather.  Torino is a nice place.  Cleaner than some of the other Italian cities we have been in, and much much greener.  The Olympics have definitely made an impression on the city.  You see advertisements for the Olympics everywhere, even two years later.  The metro is spectacularly clean.  You could probably eat off of the floors if you wanted to (which who does?), and the trains are graffiti-less, a first here in Italy.  If you’re looking for some adventure, though, Torino might not be the place to go.  Sure, the Alps are a nice setting and backdrop, but for travelers who need something to DO there isn’t much to offer. 

The highlight of our trip in Torino was our time spent at the Huntsman Pub, a little pub near the Porta Nuova train station where people speak English and follow football.  Lots and lots of football.  We had a chance to catch the Arsenal v. West Brom match on Saturday, which was a cakewalk for Arsenal since West Brom was only recently brought up to the Premier League level after being at what they call the Championship level for a while (think being a Triple-A baseball team playing against a Major League team… easy).  Yesterday was all about football.  The first match of the season for Manchester United was against Newcastle, who are a good team but not nearly as good as the big four: Arsenal, Manchester United, Chelsea, and Liverpool.  It should have been easy for the defending champions both of the premiership and the champions league, but no.  We must have jinxed it.  Or Ronaldo did with his bum knee, the traitor.  We drew.  First match of the season and a 1-1 draw.  Disappointment for sure, but hopefully when Ronnie’s knee is better and Hargreaves tendonitis is gone we’ll be back at full strength. 

We also got to catch some of the Juventus match versus AC Milan, in Italian and none of which we understood.  In Italian football there are four main teams: Juventus, AC Milan, Inter Milan, and Roma.  Juventus just so happens to be from Torino, so you can imagine which team all of the people in the pub were going for.  Their main guy, Del Piero, is a stud striker who has been playing for the Italian national team for what seems like forever.  The keeper for Juventus is also the keeper for the Italy national team, but he wasn’t playing yesterday. 

It’s crazy watching Italian fans watching football.  Think Boston Red Sox fans, but on crack if that’s even possible.  There are all different kinds of people who come to bars and watch the matches.  Old men, young boys, parents with their kids, grandmothers, anyone and everyone comes together to cheer for their squad.  It’s love and hate all swirled in to one.  It’s like that with any sport for any real fan, though: a constant state of agony.  You’re never completely satisfied.  Even when you’ve won, there is always something you could have done better.  Why did they pull Lincecum out in the 7th instead of letting him pitch the eighth?  Why did Lewis swing at the first pitch?  Doesn’t he know anything?  Agony.  Constant agony.

We saw two good falls, by the way, during our time in Torino.  The first, a motorcyclist trying to show off popping a wheelie going 40 down a street and having his bike slip out from under him.  He slid across the street and after a loud ‘thud’ his bike was no more.  It shouldn’t have been funny but who am I kidding- it was.  The other fall came from an elderly woman in the footballing pub, who was sloshed out of her mind and took a dive going up a step to her table.  She fell, got back up with some help, and then fell off of her chair on to the floor.  Oh, and she dropped a fry on the floor, picked it up and ate it.  Really, it happened.

We left Torino this morning after checking out of our room and watching some Olympic weight lifting.  Yes, weight lifting.  If the Italians are competing in it, they put it on TV.  We leave tonight for Barcelona around 8 and get in tomorrow morning at 9am.  A 13 or 14 hour train ride.  Oh, the joy. 

As for the experience in Italy as a whole, there’s a lot of good and a lot of bad.  There’s a big graffiti problem here.  In the big cities especially, a lot of graffiti.  As much as the cities are beautiful, all of the graffiti takes away from their overall impression on people traveling and visiting.  The food is wonderful here, let me tell you.  Pizza, spaghetti, and bread bread bread.  Sure, you get the good and the bad, but when it’s good… it’s really really good.  It sucks being a tourist, not knowing where you’re going and being in a constant state of frustration and confusion, but you find good people who remind you of home everywhere you go.  I saw a Golden State Warriors jersey while we were at the Colusseum and told the guy I liked his shirt.  Jason Richardson, an oldie but a goodie.  And the guy working the internet cafe in Florence- a Dodgers fan.  Bad decision, for sure, but still cool to talk some baseball to someone.  No one knows baseball anywhere in Italy, but they all wear Yankees hates.  Ugh.

I’m not trying to make a meaning of life out of this or anything; that’s for someone else to do.  God, J.K. Rowling, I don’t know.  What I am saying is that Italy is definitely worth a look for those people who are out there looking for a something, whatever that something is.  Romance, nature, history, food.  Something. 

I should probably go and brush up on my Spanish since I don’t think ‘Hola’ and ‘taco’ are going to cut it in Spain. 

Ciao.

Our travels have brought us to Torino, our final destination (well, stay at least) here in Italy.  We left Milan earlier today after a reasonable stay, relaxing and seeing what they had to offer.  It’s not much, let me tell you.  Milan is a big city with a lot to offer, but again a lot of things are closed because of vacationing, which I believe they call ‘ferie’ here in Italy.  Basically, everyone in Italy up and leaves to go to the coast, places like Nice and Cannes, while the rest of us travelers are stuck trying to find places like restaurants that would normally be close, but are now much further away because of the holiday.

A few observations about Milan that I didn’t have the chance to add before: there’s really not much going on in a city you hear so much about.  I mean, Milan is supposed to be the fashion capital of the world, right?  You would think it would be a more exciting place.  Another complaint: the church where the last supper is.  Sold out for 2 weeks?  They only let 25 people into the church every 15 minutes.  I’m all for crowd control, but when 2 travelers can’t come and see one of the world’s most famous paintings for two weeks because they are worried about crowd control, there is a problem.

Enough about Milan though, let’s move on to Torino.

We have been here in Torino for a couple of hours now and we already have good vibes.  Our hostel was easy to find and the people here are very nice.  We asked about restaurants since everything around here is closed, and the guy at the desk called a few to see if they were open before sending us on our way.  How nice is that?  Good vibes from Torino are also coming our way because it’s RAINING here!  Yes, raining!  After dealing with hot, hot, and more hot, rain is the perfect kind of weather for us right now.  I’m finally able to put on these things called jeans, which I haven’t been able to wear all trip, and they feel great.

As far as Turin vs. Torino, I think the Italian pronunciation of it is Torino but we Americans can’t pronounce words like that, so we call it Turin.  I think Torino sounds much better, personally, but so does Firenze (Florence), Sicilia (Sicily) and Venezia (Venice).

One thing that we are missing right now in Torino is American coverage of the Olympics.  We get the Olympics on the TV here, but it’s all in Italian, which obviously we don’t understand, and all of the athletes featured are the Italian athletes.  A lot of fencing, judo, volleyball, even ping pong.  No gymnastics, basketball, or swimming (mostly for Michael Phelps).

We were able to catch coverage of the 10000m I believe for track, which doesn’t sound like it would be that interesting but both Thomas and I were amazed by it.  Over 20 girls running for 30 minutes faster than the speed of light around a track for something like 25 times.  Nuts.  I could never do it.

I think our plan for tomorrow is to look around and check out the downtown square, hopefully see some of the stuff from the Olympics in 2006, and try to figure out a way to get to the Juventus stadium for Thomas to take pictures.  Oh, and find a restaurant to eat at since nothing is open around here!

Still working on getting pictures up.  I’ll keep everyone posted!

Ciao

We made it to Milan safely and easily after a boring and uneventful stay in Venice.  Now, let me just preface by saying, Venice isn’t all bad.  I’m sure if you stayed in the city center with someone you loved it’d be an absolute dream.  However, staying in a dump listening to romantic music in the blistering hot with your brother… doesn’t exactly sound appealing.

Our stay here in Milan has been alright.  Once again, everything is closed because of the holiday and nothing is open again until the very end of the month or the beginning of September.  The one thing we DID want to see, The Last Supper, in a church here in Milan, we couldn’t see.  Turns out the tickets to get into the church are SOLD OUT for the next two weeks straight.  Yes, two weeks.  We were amazed too.  And pissed off. 

We had quite an excursion trying to find a WC around here (bathroom), and walking to the San Siro.  San Siro, for you non-football fans, is the Holy Grail of football stadiums here in Milan.  Both Inter Milan and AC Milan play football there.  The stadium there is HUGE.  No wonder people love their football here, the stadiums are like cathedrals. 

Other than that, we went to a church here and walked around a lot.  Lots of pigeons.  Less people than in Venice.  Nice. 

We are heading to Torino tomorrow before going to Barcelona, since the train for tomorrow night was sold out (boo).  We hope Torino is nice and quiet like Florence was.  I wanna see all of the stuff ffrom the olympics.  It was there in winter 2006.

Sorry this post is so short.  The computer i’m on is very glitchy and is hard to type on.  Not a lot of time left to type! 

Finally, thanks for all of the great comments and messages.  We love reading them when we have the chance to stop in and read them.  We’re actively sending postcards so if you never gave me your address you can still email it to me at cat_brad@yahoo.com

Miss everyone and hope things are good in California (and the US in general).

Ciao.

We left Florence reluctantly yesterday after having a great time relaxing and seeing the sights around town, getting used to the laid back pace we hadn’t seen while we were in Rome.  Our entire experience there was amazing- great hostel, great people, great food… we already miss it there.  After waking up at around 7 to get our things together, we took our last stroll through Florence before arriving at the Firenze train station to board our Eurostar train to Venice.  One thing we’ve noticed about Italy are that there are McDonalds EVERYWHERE, in every train station, in every city we’ve seen so far.  It’s almost a bit sad- here we are in Italy having McDonalds McMuffins for breakfast when we should be eating Italian food for breakfast.  Italian breakfasts are coffee, though, so it’s better to have something than nothing at all.

The train ride was fine through Bologna and into Venice.  That’s when things got really interesting.  We got into the Venice San Lucia train station around 2 yesterday afternoon and after wandering around for 20 minutes confused and extremely frustrated (not to mention hot), we figured out that our hotel was on the MAINLAND in Venice and not in VENICE venice, if that makes any sense.  See, there’s a difference between Venice mainland and Venice the island of Venice, since it takes about a 10 minute regional train ride to get between the two.  To get back to the mainland, we hopped on a metro train for about €2 and finally figured out what our directions were telling us to do.  It was much easier, obviously, since we were taking the directions from the right train station and all.  Haha.

500 meters later, and a lot of sweat and frustration, we made it to our hotel on mainland Venice.  Let me be the first to say- this hotel is SHADY.  It’s in the middle of this residential street with no one around, like a ghost town and the walk under the passageway to get to and from the Mestre train station is hella creepy.  Lots of graffiti, lots of weird smells, just all around a very very weird place.

One thing about Italy that I had heard about, but not really seen yet, was that during the month of August many people leave the cities in Italy to go and vacation elsewhere.  Thus, many hotels, restaurants, and shops are closed down because everyone is gone.  On the mainland in Venice, everything is closed down.  Everything.  Last night we wandered around for almost an hour trying to find a single restaurant that was open, walking down these shady, dirty streets in the middle of nowhere.  Imagine downtown Oakland, but a million times worse.  And empty.  We finally found a little pizzeria near the Mestre station that was open, and I don’t think either of us have ever been so happy just to see a pizza place in our entire lives.  Let’s just say our stay in Venice hasn’t been off to a great start.

Our plan for today is to wander around the Grand Canal here on the island before heading to Milan tomorrow.  Our original plan was to go from Milan to Nice, but since everything in Nice is so expensive, all the hostels and the hotels, most likely we are going to go straight from Milan to Barcelona instead of stopping in the south of France.  It sucks, but that’s the way things go sometimes.  At least that will give us an extra couple of days in the UK to travel around, so it’s not completely disappointing.

On a completely unrelated note, I can’t believe we’ve only been in Europe for 6 days.  7 days?  Whatever.  Time here seems like it goes so slow.  Maybe that’s because all we do is walk around, look, talk to each other, eat, and sleep.  We’ve seen so much and been so many places, you’d think it would be taking a lot longer than it has been.  The UK seems so far away right now, and as much as we love seeing everything here in Italy, I think both of us see London as the peak of our travels around here.  Going pub hopping, watching football, and being in a country where people speak the same language as us.  While I think both of us enjoy the fact that we’re doing this together, looking around and exploring everything, it gets to be tiresome and lonely.

More than anything, though, Venice has worn us down.  Getting lost, being hot and sweaty, it doesn’t really make either of us want to jump up when we wake up in the morning.  I’m sure for a lot of people, Venice could be the pinnacle, the peak of their entire journey here in Europe, but for us we’re hoping that there’s a lot more out in the world than this.

I’m going to keep trying to find a place to put up our pictures from our travels here.  I haven’t been able to find anything yet, but hopefully sooner than later I’ll be able to post something.

Until next time, Ciao.

Thomas and I have had a great stay in Florence so far and we’re almost sad to be leaving tomorrow.  The city here is our kind of style- small and quaint, but still has a lot of heart and soul.  It may not be the biggest city in Italy, but to us Florence has a lot more of the Italian spectacle and magic than Rome ever had.

Yesterday, after we had a chance to sit down yesterday and just relax after our long walk and expedition trying to find out hostel, Thomas and I made it over to the Uffizi art gallery to check out the different works of art in Florence’s most famous Italian art gallery.  The most famous work at the Uffizi Gallery, ‘The Birth of Venus’, is an absolute spectacle and is absolutely breathtaking to see in person.  Besides that, though, we found the Uffizi gallery to be a bit of a disappointment.  Other than the ‘Birth of Venus’ most of the other art in the gallery is medieval religious art from around the 1400’s, which after a while all starts to blend together and can be a bit of a bore.

Our adventures today, however, were much more exciting.  After sleeping for what must have been 12 hours last night, we got on and walking around Florence around 10:30 this morning before making reservations on a train to Venice tomorrow.  After we took care of the reservations, we made our way to the Accademia, which is most famous for Michelangelo’s ‘David’.  The line, while it was long, moved pretty quickly and before we knew it we were inside the museum staring up at one of the most famous sculptures in the world.

‘David’ is absolutely breathtaking.  You would think you’d be prepared for it, but the sight of it exceeds all expectations.  The sculpture itself is absolutely humongous.  It is probably about twice of my own height, and is on a pedestal which makes it even taller.  The details to the sculpture are what make it so incredible.  All of the veins, the muscles, the details of the hair and the features are all perfectly done so that even though you know it isn’t real, the attention to detail almost makes it seem as though it is.

After seeing ‘David’ we made it back to the hostel, hung out for a little while, and headed over to a little bar called Friends to watch the Community Shield match between Manchester United and Portsmouth.  Manchester United won on penalties, of course, but the fun part of watching the match was being around other football fans watching the match instead of it being just us watching the match at 4 in the morning in our PJ’s in Rocklin.  After a pint of Guinness, we met a family of Portsmouth fans from England who were here on vacation in Florence, so they bought us a pint of Harp while talking about Las Vegas, what people in Scotland are like, and other random things.

Typing right now, post-bar, is a little difficult.  After a couple of pints of beer, and a Long Island Iced Tea (which I’m sure has been the death of me), I’m probably what you would call drunk, so while I’m having a pretty good time writing this, getting the right keys in order has been a lot more difficult than it usually would be.

Tomorrow the plan is to get in to Venice and explore, since we’ll be there until the morning of the 13th before we move on to Milan.  I think we’ll both miss how beautiful and quaint Florence is, but hopefully Venice will be just as amazing. 

I’ll write more when I have the chance to update how life is in Venice.  I probably, after tonight, need to remind myself to lay off of the Guinness post-Manchester United victory but you’re only in Italy once, right?  I’m sure it will be a lot worse once I get to Scotland.  I’ve been warned that the Scottish drink like tanks so I’m in for a rude awakening.

Until next time- Ciao

We made it to Florence this morning after spending our last night hanging out with the British girls in Rome.  I must’ve woken up at like, 5 o’clock this morning before laying back down for another hour or so to relax before getting up and moving around, packing up our stuff and planning out the rest of our day.  We checked out of our hostel this morning around 9, put on our packs and made our last trip on the Metro in Rome to the Termini, where we waited around, had a McMuffin, and boarded our Eurostar train to Florence, which they call ‘Firenze’ here in Italy.  We sat next to these two old Italian people headed to Milan on the train, who understood NO english but we could tell they were friendly, nice people.

The ride to Florence is absolutely beautiful.  THIS is where the beauty in Italy comes from: the small towns, the fields, the little old houses in the middle of vineyards and rolling hills throughout the country.  No graffiti, no nonsense- just pure beauty.  The train ride lasted a little over an hour and a half into Florence, so after the train stopped Thomas and I got off and tried figuring out how to make it to our new hostel.  This hostel was a lot more difficult to find than our last one, especially since Florence doesn’t have a metro system since it’s much smaller than Rome.  We got on a bus like our hostel directions said, but even after we asked the bus driver if the stop we needed was on his line, he never told us WHAT stop we had to get off on.  So, after getting lost, Thomas and I walked with our packs on in the heat for well over 20 minutes before we found our hostel.

This hostel, the Soggiorno Pitti, is MUCH nicer than the one in Rome.  They have TV, which I said a ‘Halleilujah’ for, and we have our own room and bathroom in the hostel.  Turns out we have to share a bed, which is… whatever, it is what it is, we came from the same place so it’s not a big deal.  We got a chance to catch a little bit of the Olympics finally, since we haven’t seen any of it yet, so we watched a couple of swimming heats before getting our room.  We have a TV in our room, but it only has like, 10 channels and all of them (of course) are in Italian.  After settling in, we watched a little bit of MTV Italia, and their version of TRL was on.  It was pretty funny since all of the music videos for the Italian artists are SO BAD, but they still have at least a couple of American and British music videos on their countdown.  Randomly, the top 2 songs on their playlist were ‘Killing Me Softly’ by The Fugees and ‘When A Man Loves A Woman’ by Michael Bolton.  Random?  We thought so.

So our plan for tomorrow is to explore Florence since we’ve only got 1 day here to really look around, so I think we’re going to go and see the Galleria dell’Accademia where Michaelangelo’s David is, and the Uffizi Art Gallery where a lot of famous pieces of art are.  It’s going to be a busy busy day with a lot of walking but Florence is a small town so I doubt it’ll be too strenuous, especially since we don’t have to wear our packs everywhere.

I haven’t been able to put our pictures up on the internet yet, but when I have the chance I’ll try and show everyone what our travels have been like.

Ciao

So Thomas and I are posting again from an internet cafe in Rome.  It’s our last day here, since we’re going to Florence and Pisa tomorrow to explore until we move onto Venice in a couple of days.  Since we posted last, we made it back to the Colusseum to take a couple of pictures as well as have dinner at a little cafe near the Colusseum.  The food hasn’t been much of a transition for either of us.  A lot of pizza, a lot of spaghetti, bread, etc.  Not much of a stretch for people who eat pizza and spaghetti on a frequent basis, although the quality (especially of the spaghetti) is way better than in America.

Yesterday was probably our most social day here since we met our two dormmates in our hostel, Sophie and Nancy, with whom we spent well over 2 hours discussing American stereotypes, British stereotypes, having a good laugh along the way.  It was pretty funny, they were both REALLY interested in how high school is in America since it’s pretty different in England.  They are both on their gap year, which is basically a break in between graduating from school and going to university.  Nancy introduced herself to us and goes ‘Nancy, that’s a pretty American name, right?’ and Thomas and I just look at each other and go ‘Umm… I guess?  Not really’.  Haha. 

We got to talking about, among other things, football, where to go in England, what Scottish people are like (dirty and rugged, sound funny apparently), and what people in America are like.  I guess being from California makes us really cool, especially since we are both from different parts of the state (Santa Barbara and near San Francisco).  We explained baseball and basketball to them, learned about rounders (?) and netball, and got to hear their best American accent impressions. 

We made our reservations on the train to Florence today, so we leave tomorrow at 10:30 to Florence and after checking into our hostel we are going to try and make the day trip out to Pisa to see the leaning tower. 

So far today we’ve seen the Trevi Fountain, the four rivers fountain, and the Pantheon.  The Trevi Fountan is absolutely gorgeous.  Huge, amazing, a spectacular sight.  We both threw coins over our backs and made a wish before moving on to the Pantheon.  The dome inside the Pantheon is what makes it the most impressive.  The four rivers fountain is in the middle of being restored, which kind of sucks, but it is still beautiful.

We’re off to see more sights in Rome before we leave so we’ll update more when we get our bearings in Florence.

Ciao!

Ahhh…

We finally made it to Italy.  All 14 hours later on a plane, from San Francisco to Rome, we’re finally here.  We left Rocklin at about 3 in the morning and drove to San Francisco International Airport to leave on our Delta flight to JFK airport in New York.  Turns out the confirmation code we needed to get our passes to get through security didn’t work so luckily we were able to find a lady who could help us and printed them out for us.  Then the fun began.  I had forgotten, but I guess when you use the passes my mom had given us for the discounted flights, your ticket is ‘flagged’ and you have to go through the all-on wave down by the security officers at the airport.  Thomas and I were both flagged, had to be wanded and our ENTIRE backpacks had to be wiped with these special cloths so that they could make sure we weren’t terrorists and were bringing bombs to the airport.  Unfortunately for the TSA guy, my bag has a LOTTT of pockets, so he had to go through every single one and wipe it down.  It didn’t take too long but it was still funny.

After we checked in at the desk and were given our seats, imagine our surprise when we were both given ‘zone 1′ tickets.  Huh? Zone 1?  Is that… first class??  Why yes, yes it is first class.  Cushy seats, our own butler, complimentary drinks.  Let me just say, first class is the way to go.  And… we didn’t have to pay for it.  As my Uncle Scott likes to say, it was all my favorite ‘f’ word’- ‘free’.  We got into JFK around 3:30 east coast time, which is 12:30 California time, and waited around until 5:30 when we boarded our flight to Rome.  At first, our seat assignments were in zone 9, which we were both fine with since hey, we are going to Rome… why complain?  Then, just as we were boarding, our nice desk attendant check in lady told us to sit in seats 4 a and b.  We got onto the plane and realized both seats were in International First Class.  Comforters on the seats, pillows fluffed, champagne at the ready.  Thomas and I looked at each other and laughed because it felt so bizarre, sitting in first class with all of these old italian people.  The flight went by really quickly.  I wasn’t able to fall asleep until the last 2 hours or so of the flight, so I spent my time watching episodes of Sex and the City and Entourage on the seatback TV’s and watching the new Chronicles of Narnia movie, Prince Caspian. 

After we landed, we tried calling home to give the heads up that we made it, but turns out… the phones in Italy are WEIRD and we couldn’t figure out for the life of us how to use them.  I lost my sunglasses on the way to the train station across the street from the airport, which sucked, but I’m going to get some cheap new ones soon.  We got to the train station and found out where to go pretty easily.  There are a lot of signs that are written in 2 languages in Italy: Italian and English.  That helps out a lot.  We took a train from the airport to the Roma Termini, which is like Grand Central Station, and took a Metro one stop up to the station that our hostel was at.  Found the hostel really easily, but our beds weren’t ready yet so we went off to explore the city. 

First impressions of Rome: It’s hot.  Very very very hot here, with a lot of humidity, so Thomas and I are both sweating like dogs out here.  We decided since we needed to kill a couple hours before our room would be ready we should go see the Colusseum, which is only 1 stop up from our hostel.  We got to the Colusseum, waited in line for an hour and a half or so and made our way inside the Colusseum.  The location itself is a little crazy- there’s this massive, historical ruin you see in all of these pictures in the middle of an urban area with restaurants and apartments and everything.  It has definitely become very touristy.  We walked around the Colusseum SWEATING and made our way to a little cafe to have some lunch.  Pizza, of course.  Oh, and beer.  Which I bought.  Myself.  Thought that was funny. 

We were both exhausted so we made our way back to our hostel and waited a couple minutes before going into our rooms and PASSING OUT.  We slept from around 4 in the afternoon here to about 7 this morning.  It has definitely helped with the jetlag, and Thomas and I were both ready and rested to tackle Vatican City today.

So today was our Vatican City day, and after waking up and showering (as well as locking myself in the bathroom… woops) we made our way to the holiest place on earth for Catholics, Vatican City.  Let me just say the entire place is awe inspiring, even moreso than the Colusseum.  It is breathtakingly beautiful; the courtyard, the statues, the buildings.  It is all absolutely incredible.  We waited in line to go and see the basilica, which has the canopy inside of it and a lot of famous statues.  We also saw the papal tombs inside of the basilica, where a lot of people were, rosaries in hand, paying their respects to John Paul II.  Afterwards we made our way to the Vatican Museums, which is around the corner, and saw a lot more statues, paintings, and tapestries before walking into the Sistine Chapel.  Now, let me just say, I have seen many many famous and beautiful things in my life, but never before have I been AWE STRUCK by something.  I can’t even describe how beautiful the Sistine Chapel is, it was that amazing.  First off, the ceilings are huge.  You can’t take pictures inside or talk loudly, but why would you want to? All you can do inside is look up and stare.  Thomas and I both look at each other are were like, I’m set.  If this whole trip ends right now, I’m absolutely set.

And now we’re here, sitting in a little internet cafe around the corner from Vatican City getting ready to go and see the Trevi Fountain and hit up a little Scottish pub that should be around the corner here somewhere.  We have to make it back over to the Colusseum tonight to take pictures since, woops, we forgot our cameras before so we have to make it up by seeing it at night.  As far as tomorrow is concerned, it is most likely a museum-filled day, to the Borghese Gallery and a couple others before resting and heading to Pisa and ending in Florence on Saturday.

The language barrier hasnt been a huge problem so far, and everyone for the most part is really helpful.  There is a LOT of graffiti here, and a lot of football merchandise, espeically for the Italian national team.  People here really love their football.  We both got a little homesick last night, and a little into the ‘what have we gotten ourselves into’ mindset in the middle of the night last night, but I think with Vatican City, we are both sure of why we are here.  As much as we miss Rocklin and California (not to mention non-sweaty weather) we know that this is a once in a lifetime opportunity and we should savor things like seeing the Sistine Chapel while we still can.

I’ll be sure to post more once we make it to another internet cafe, most likely tomorrow afternoon to kill some time, and try to call home once we figure out how to use the phones! 

-catherine