Vacations That Change Your Life: Day 4

Monday: I woke up early today but actually got myself ready right away. I was one of the first ones down to breakfast, which was great because I'm a slow eater- which you probably are already aware of. Anyways, I had the same yummy breakfast again: orange juice, french toast with honey and banana slices, and a caffé latté. Unfortunately, not everyone in the group was able to have such a good morning and we ended up waiting on a few to finish their breakfast. When we were finally all ready we left the hostel and hurried to the nearest métro. Our tour guide from last night had told us that he does a Vatican museums/Sistine Chapel tour for a reduced price and that he could meet us at a certain métro stop at 10a to walk together to Vatican City to do the tour. We were all over this because you often have to get to the Vatican museums around 6:30a simply to avoid waiting for 2 to 3 hours; you will always have to wait some amount of time. But with a tour guide you skip the lines and go right in. We definitely didn't want to miss out on this opportunity and we also had had a really good experience with our tour guide so far. So we had to push it to the métro in order to not miss him. We finally got there and ran down stairs, pushed through the crowds of people, stood in line, bought our little one euro tickets, got all six of us through the turnstiles, and just made it in time for the train we needed. It was a human salad inside the train so it was really difficult to read our maps and find out which stop we needed. Fortunately, a woman had been listening to our conversation and picked up on the fact that we wanted to go to the Vatican. She was able to tell us the stop that is closest to the Vatican and we got off there at 9:50a: 10 minutes before Greg (our tour guide) was planning to start walking to the Vatican!

However, when we got to the top of the stairs leaving the métro, we took one look around and realized he was not there. We walked up and down the street a little, crossed the street to the métro that goes the opposite direction, and had no luck. We had no idea where he was and we were running out of time; he had promised to wait for up to 10 minutes extra because he knows that the métro can be difficult, but how were we supposed to locate him?! We suddenly felt like idiots for not getting his phone number. We decided to split into two groups of three; one would get back on the métro and take it farther down and the other (the one I was in) would [power] walk to the next métro stop. Well, we did that and no luck. We had a minor epiphany on the way, though, that we had indeed gotten off at the wrong stop. However, by then it was 10:20a and we knew there was no way he was still waiting around, wherever he was. I'm bummed to say that we never saw Greg again; hopefully he wasn't waiting for us very long.

We met back up at our original métro stop after that and just shook it off- there was no point in getting frustrated about what had happened. So, we walked ourselves to Vatican City and hoped that we would be able to find another tour guide with prices as good as Greg's. At least the tour guides at the big attractions in Rome aren't hard to find; they find you. We had been standing outside of Vatican City for no more than 10 seconds before a guy came up to us rattling off all of the perks of his company's tours. It was five euros more than Greg's but we decided to go for it, thinking we wouldn't be able to find better prices when we were buying the tour on the grounds of the site. A little I.D. check, money exchange, and 10 minute introduction, and before we knew it, we were in line to go inside... VATICAN CITY IN ROME, ITALY! WHAT?!!!

That's Vatican City behind that wall!!

=D

Waiting to go in!

OMG!!!!!!

The last step before becoming one of the coolest people ever: GO UP!

The grounds of Vatican City!

The first phase of the tour was to walk through the main museums. The Vatican has one of the richest collections of art in the world, and it certainly is the richest country in the world. Gosh this was such an elegant place to spend a little time today.

Some of the art we saw in the museums:

The first of many breathtaking ceilings

;)

Believe me, from where we finished our tour, this is nothing

;)

So we were walking through all of this glorious, Ancient and Renaissance era art and listening to our tour guide through little walkie-talkies when we arrived in a tiny, circular room. There wasn't much to it; mostly it had a really pretty ceiling, and my friends captured a good pic of me appreciating it.

 There were benches in the room so it was almost like a rest stop where you can decide if you want to head back through any of the museums or go over to Saint Peter's basilica. But then..... you see a small sign across the way. It looks like every other sign you've seen in the museums so far; it's the same in every way... except for the name:             CAPPELLA SISTINA

We were there. I couldn't breathe. My heart started pounding. I felt like I was either about to get married to a man I've never met, birth my first child, or land a plane full of children in the middle of the ocean. "I don't think I can do it," is all I could say to myself. But you know what? I did. I did it and I am truly a changed person because of it.

MASTERPIECES OF THE SITINE CHAPEL, BY MICHELANGELO:

"Original Sin and Banishment from the Garden of Eden," "Creation of Eve," "Creation of Adam," "Separation of Land from Sea," "Creation of the Sun, Moon, and Plants," "Separation of Light from Darkness,"

and ME beneath them

"The Last Judgement" (credit for picture goes to Chantalle)

"Creation of Adam" (thanks again to Chantalle)

Game over. Vacation done. I had seen enough. Honestly, what more was there to see? I had just been inside the most famous room in the world, staring with my own two eyes at the most famous frescoes in our history. Me, Samantha; Samantha Christensen from Modesto, California; she has looked at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel that was decorated by Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni. I still can't get my head around this new reality. 

Fortunately, though, I did not follow my thought process that there was no more to see, because it ended up not being so... Saint Peter's Basilica is, categorically, something to see. But I'm getting ahead of myself-

After the Sistine Chapel, we walked slowly through a few more of the Vatican Museums. They had all become massively unimpressive by now, but this is beside the point. We strolled through a museum of Ancient Egyptian art that was pretty cool, and we also were able to go into a museum that was dedicated solely to the works of Raphaël. Raphaël was a very important artist during the Renaissance and I recognized at least one of the paintings in his gallery from my art history class. I found this to also be a theme throughout my entire week in Italy and it enhanced my experience ten-fold. It is so the coolest thing ever when you walk into a museum and recognize the works in there. It is even cooler when you can remember specific things you've learned about them and can share them with others.

In the Ancient Egypt museum:

statue of Queen Tuya

statue of the cat Goddess Bastet, with the mummy of the animal inside

In the Raphaël room:

"School of Athens" (totally knew this one!)

What an incredible experience! We were thoroughly famished after this very long and very full morning so we headed out to find us some Italian grub afterwards. We found a place that had different varieties of flatbread pizza and different pastas. I decided to be a piggish American and order a bowl of lasagna AND a whole slice of pizza. Naturally, I also had a dessert: my first taste of real Italian gelato, and it was made with Nutella!!

Very, VERY excited for my gelato

We were, at this point, six of the coolest people in the world. But we felt that this wasn't good enough and decided to become saint-like: we walked ourselves over to Saint Peter's Basilica. This is yet another piece of art that I learned about in my art history class, and I'll never forget what my teacher taught us about the shape of the courtyard: there are two curved, columned structures on either side that are meant to resemble the arms of God reaching out in an embrace. What she told us is that the proper way to visit the basilica is by walking straight towards it from the center street. It can easily be reached by walking through the columns on the side but then you miss the effect of being "welcomed" by God to the most luxurious building that has probably ever been created. The basilica is "new" compared to its Ancient Roman counterparts around the city, but it is built almost entirely by old materials. I mentioned to you before that the palace on Palatine Hill doesn't stand anymore because it was torn down to provide materials for the Vatican. This is true for a lot of ancient structures/buildings; anything that was made out of that famous Roman marble was taken apart. The stunning marble floors inside Saint Peter's, the marble walls, the gold details, all of it is technically ancient. And it almost collapsed me to my knees when I walked inside. Surely, it was the first thing in my whole nine weeks here so far to move me all the way to tears.

We can see it but I refused to look more than once; I wanted the proper effect!

Wow. Just... wow.

Sooooooo happy!

I love this picture. You can really see the giganticness of this structure.

The Pope's window

The interior. Believe you me, if you haven't been here yourself, you have never seen anything like it.

Michelangelo's "Pièta." Another thing I studied in my art history class, and the thing that really got me going.

These pictures are pathetic, so you know. This is truly a place that cannot be shared with others by telling them about it or trying to show them it without bringing them to it. It is something that can only be experienced personally by coming to see it for yourself. And I highly recommend you all do just that. It was something, for me, that I would like to bring everyone I love to marvel at someday. By the way, I took a really great 3 minute video of the interior but it's too big to post on here (gallery.me.com/ranthy). I hope you'll watch it because, while the video is also lame compared to the reality of what I was trying to record, I watched it again and it captured very well my impression of the place while I was in it. For one, I feel like you can hear some emotion in my voice while I'm talking. Two, I don't talk for most of it, and that is really because I completely forgot that I was taking a video. I just could focus on nothing; that place truly dazzles the human mind.

After our experiences inside, all six of us unanimously agreed that we were done for the day. It was early evening and was still light out but we had no desire to do anything else. We wanted to go sit down somewhere, enjoy a long dinner, talk, tell stories, and just let the magnificence of what we had done today sink in and be absorbed. We headed back to our hostel after that because it was too early for dinner. But that was okay, we were able to just chill in our room for an hour or so, talking and goofing off and I wrote in my journal for a while. When we were at that point where our silliness was taking over our behavior, we decided it was time for dinner. We headed back to the restaurant that we ate at on our first night in Rome because it was just down the street from our hostel. We had bread in olive oil and vinegar, red wine, and I had spinach and ricotta raviolis in tomato sauce. On top of that, I had a small tart that was nothing more than a shortbread type of crust filled with Nutella. We got to the point that we were floating, and decided that tonight was the night to use our "free welcome drink" cards from the front desk. I went to the bar with a couple of the girls just as the bartender lined up about 20 free shots of tequila for everyone who was present. *He also spilled a line of some sort of alcohol on the counter and lit it on fire and that was really cool. (Can you tell that I'm not 21 yet??)* So we had our free tequila, then I used my ticket and had another free White Russian. I seem to have good luck with that drink- it is very delicious and has been free every time I've ever ordered it. After that we danced a little but mostly just hung out; people weren't really dancing so we looked kind of lame. I used the time to borrow an iPad from the front desk and was able to send an e-mail to my mom that I was having a great time and was available. No sooner than I had sent that, she called my phone through Skype and I got to tell my family all about the things I had seen today and how impressive I found them all to be. We talked for something like 45 minutes and it put me in just that much more of a good mood. When we said bye, I headed up to the room, took a shower, and basically just went right to bed. I think this day might end up going in my collection of "best days of my life."

Vacations That Change Your Life: Day 3

Sunday: We got ourselves up fairly early today to make it out of the hostel by 8:30a but that definitely didn't happen. At least we ended up eating the hostel's breakfast, so we didn't have to take care of that when we finally left at 9:45a. Breakfast was actually amazing; so good that I had the same thing all three days. A caffé latte, french toast with banana slices and honey on top, and a glass of orange juice. All for five euros!

We had a plan for the day but we didn't have a schedule. We knew we wanted to go see the Colosseum but we didn't know exactly when, how much time that would take, exactly how far away it was, or what we would do after. We sort of just started walking in that general direction and enjoyed the sites along the way. We saw ruins scattered around various parts of the city- a theme that is magnificently present all over Rome and completely boggles the mind. I took a video of an old Italian man playing fun music on his accordion, we enjoyed the architecture and warm colors of the Italian buildings, and far sooner and much more suddenly than we expected, God pulled back the curtains and we were faced with this:

It was one of those moments where the wind physically was knocked out of me; like when you get kicked in the chest. The Colosseum: an ancient, man-made structure that continues to stand tall; something that sits in the middle of a bustling, modern city; a grand display of humanity- the things human beings are actually capable of creating with their own two hands and the acts they are more than capable of of committing agains other living creatures. After all, this structure was built by Jewish slaves and was built as a stadium for murder matches. And on that note, the Gladiators who fought, killed, and died within that stadium were slaves as well. Imagine if I took you to a gigantic pile of stone and materials, handed you a floor plan of the Colosseum and said, "build it." Can you also imagine being told you have to earn your freedom by fighting to the death- of you or another? Can you imagine standing on the edge of this massive building, filled with 60,000 shouting people, and having to actually step inside? And not only that, you have to take the weapon in your hands and attempt to kill that man just across the way or that starved, cage-cramped beast (lion, giraffe, elephant, etc) about to be released. It is unfathomable to me the history of this structure and I simply marveled at it's grandness. What an absolutely horrifying and fantastic thing humans created oh so long ago. Long before they even "had anything."

Joe (he's not crying, he was trying to hide), Chantalle, Michaela, Selene

After our tour of the Colosseum and our hour or so of free time to walk around inside, we met back up with our group for the second half of the tour: Palatine Hill. Palatine Hill is the center of the Seven Hills of Rome and is the original site of most of the Ancient City. Palatine Hill used to be dominated almost entirely by a palace that was the home of three different Roman emperors- Vespasian, Titus, Domitian; hence the name "Palatine" (where we get the word "palace"). When it stood, it was probably the largest, tallest, longest, grandest building that has ever and possibly will ever grace our earth. The reason it is in shambles today? It wasn't struck by lighting or shaken to destruction like much of the ancient city. It was torn apart to build Vatican City; specifically, Saint Peter's Basilica. This ended up being a really really common theme throughout our stay in Rome. Quite a huge chunk of the ancient cathedrals, palaces, and other buildings from Ancient Rome were not destroyed but were disassembled to provide all of the marble and elegant trimmings required by the Basilica. Here's a great description of Palatine Hill and some of its history:

According to Roman mythology, the Palatine Hill was the location of the cave, known as the Lupercal, where Romulus and Remus were found by the she-wolf that kept them alive. According to this legend, the shepherd Faustulus found the infants, and with his wife Acca Larentia raised the children. When they were older, the boys killed their great-uncle (who seized the throne from their father), and they both decided to build a new city of their own on the banks of the River Tiber. Suddenly, they had a violent argument with each other and in the end Romulus killed his twin brother Remus. This is how "Rome" got its name - from Romulus. Another legend to occur on the Palatine is Hercules' defeat of Cacus after the monster had stolen some cattle. Hercules struck Cacus with his characteristic club so hard that it formed a cleft on the southeast corner of the hill, where later a staircase bearing the name of Cacus was constructed. Rome has its origins on the Palatine. Indeed, recent excavations show that people have lived there since approximately 1000 BC. According to Livy, after the immigration of the Sabines and the Albans to Rome, the original Romans lived on the Palatine. Many affluent Romans of the Republican period (510 BC – c. 44 BC) had their residences there. During the Empire (27 BC – 476 AD) several emperors resided there; in fact, the ruins of the palaces of Augustus (63 BC – 14),Tiberius (42 BC – 37) and Domitian (51 – 96) can still be seen. Augustus also built a temple to Apollo here, beside his own palace. The Palatine Hill was also the site of the festival of the Lupercalia.

View of the Colosseum from Palatine Hill

We are technically "inside" the palace right here. The thing was so massive that it had it's own mini-arena just off of the Throne Room; the way mansions sometimes come with bowling alleys.

A view of a very small part of the palace. The white building was contracted by Mussolini to be his summer home... "I'll take my summer home on Palatine Hill, the site of Ancient Rome, with a grand view of the Colosseum please!"

A corner of the throne room was reconstructed to give a sense of how tall the building was (if it was still standing, there would be three floors above my head in this picture; there were five in total).

Looking down at the Roman Forum from Palatine Hill

Constantine's Basilica

                 "Tempio di Romolo"            "Tempio di Antoninus & Faustina"        

       Here you can see the                   The small round dome that's

 "Arch of Augustus"                            almost dead-center is

    and a little bit of the                        Cesar's tomb; apparently

                            home of the Vestal Virgins               his real grave is there

After our tour we decided we were too close to all of these amazing things to not walk around through them. We were completely starving at this point but we were going to push ourselves through the Roman Forum and see what we needed to see!

Cesar's tomb

The grave of Cesar

The Arch of Septimius Severus

Near the home of the Vestal Virgins

Beautiful and other-worldly

Finally, it was sooooo time for lunch, so we left the Forum but we had absolutely no idea where to go to find food. We had been seeing these two chariot-looking statues on the roof of some building way out in the distance all day so we decided to head towards that. It turned out to be an absolutely gorgeous but not very important building called the "Wedding Cake" (why? Because it looks like one!). We found a bar just across the street that was still serving lunch so we went in and sat down for another glorious Italian meal.

"The Wedding Cake"

Lunch! House red, gnocchi in a cream sauce, and bread

Dessert! A flaky pastry with a honey glaze

After lunch we met back up with the same guy who did our Palatine tour but for a separate evening tour. It was a much much smaller group this time and it was a lot cheaper; I think this was just his own little thing and had nothing to do with the company from the morning. He told us a little bit about the "Wedding Cake" first. Basically what he said was that this building was constructed as a monument to Vittorio Emanuele II (it's real name being "Il Vittoriano"). Emanuele was the first king of a unified Italy. The building was finished in 1935 and has drawn a lot of criticism since its construction. The main reason: a lot of Capitoline Hill was destroyed during construction and a nearby medieval neighborhood had to be leveled. Romans call it "the Typewriter" because of its square shape and conspicuous white, marble façade. A fun fact about one of the horses (I'm not certain which one): these statues are so big that, in celebration of the building's construction, 11 full-grown men ate a very fancy dinner in the belly of one of them!

We walked next from Il Vittoriano to "Trajan's Column."

After the column, we walked to the basilica of Saints Philip and James where their tombs are enshrined. Unfortunately none of my pictures there came out very well so I don't have any to post on here. :( I guess it's okay though because this post is wanting to break the record for "ridiculously longest." 

After the basilica, we walked to....... the Trevi Fountain! It was absolutely packed with people but I managed to get a few good pictures and feel like a silly tourist; I had felt like a cool one at the Colosseum and Palatine Hill.

                                       

After seeing the Trevi, we walked by the Pantheon but it was too dark to get good pictures. Not to worry, I went there during the day on my last day in Rome- good pics will come! Lastly for today, we visited the "Fountain of the Four Rivers." I'm just going to put up one picture here but you can see more in my gallery (gallery.me.com/ranthy). Well, once I have them all up that is. :)

And finally, we ended this glorious day with a glorious Italian dinner. We started off with the house white wine and then we gorged. I ordered Pizza Marinara, which was quite simply a pizza crust smothered with fresh tomato sauce, sprinkled with basil, and topped with a few pieces of roasted garlic. And that was it! No cheese, no ham, nothing else. And it was, believe you me, oh SO good. I have never tasted a more fragrant tomato-based sauce in my life than what came on top of my pizza. As if the evening couldn't get any better, my family called my french cell through Skype. And of course, because we all know that my bad luck was gone at this point, they called me just after I finished my pizza. I got to talk to them for at least 20 minutes and unload a little bit of the bad but mostly all of the wonderful things I had seen and done in the last 24+ hours. It was just the perfect little topper to my day. :)

Bonna appetito! (I made that up  =P )

After enjoying our dinner experience for a good hour or so, it was time to head back to the hostel. When we left the ristorante it was raining. I had my umbrella but not everyone in our group had a means of staying dry for the walk back to the hostel. Basically, it wasn't much longer than 20 minutes of walking in the rain that three out of six of us were not going to take any more and decided to call a cab. I was not willing to pay for that and since I am, after two months of this sort of thing, rather conditioned to walking (even in the rain) I announced my intention to find my way to the hostel on foot. Two others agreed to walk too so the three of us set off for the "second half" of our journey back to dryness. I put that in quotations because that's what you should do went something turns out not to be true, right? Well anyways, Joe, Selene and I continued to walk for at least another 10 minutes in the cold and wet before Joe started to get frustrated with how long this was all taking. I would elaborate but there's no need- basically, our map-reader had been making wrong turns here and there and we were not really making any progress back to the hostel. In a way, I don't really fault her for this. The map was hard to read and it's tough to admit to making mistakes that put others in a bad position. Still, Joe started getting a little snappy with Selene and he pretty much just took over the process of getting us to our hostel. By the time we got back we had been in the cold and rain for 45 minutes, on foot, and in bad spirits with each other. Not our finest hour but at least I was still on a roll with letting every negative thing slide right off my back. :)
We checked into our new room right after that (the 6 of us all together with no strangers for the next two nights) and I went straight up to our room. Needless to say, we were all rather épuisé after this long day, but we all dealt with our exhaustion in different ways. For instance, Joseph, Chantalle, Selene, and Michaela went down to the hostel's bar for the next hour and half and Roshanna and I each took showers and got in bed.
Phew! This was an extremely full and filling day for me. There were some low points to the day but I only remember them now because I wrote about them in my journal; they haven't managed to stick in my memory. This day was a grand experience in itself and I think I might remember it for the rest of my life; if not that long, at least long enough to tell my children about it one day. Thanks for reading!
Tomorrow, just you wait:                      VATICAN CITY!!!!!!!!!!