Bella Roma

Rome is such a fascinating city. It's a combination of ancient and new - you can walk along a street and all of a sudden you'll see ancient roman pillars or a wall - and a church or some other building will be buyilt into it. It's so intereting. Rome was fun, but I really think you need a week or two to do it justice.
We stayed in a hostel that was a little off the beaten path, it was away from the old city and therefore the hustle and bustle of all the tourists. It was nice to be able to escape that in the evening and go to a place we could hab g out and relax. There was even cooking facitliites and a fridge, so we went down the street to the grocer's and deli and got supplies for sandwiches for lunch and dinner as well as bananas and yogourt for breakfast. Rome was expensive so it was good to find some ways to save a little $$. OUr food was very yu7mmy and I still partook in daily getlato! I wish we had it on every street corner in Canada. :P
We used A LOT of public transit to get around in Rome , and let me tell you,m some of the subway trains were pretty sketchy. Not becuase they were less safe (there were 3 of us and we looked out for each other) but moreso because ssome of them looked like they were on their last legs and some of them drove like it too. There were a few occasions where we had a little bit of worry that we might break down before our stat6ion, but everything turned out OK.

As for what we did , on Wednesday we went to the Vatican (the pope was giving a service) so we sat out in the courtyard with throngs of people to check it out. It was pretty neat to see where people came from, therew was a large group of men and women from Senegal who walked in singing and dancing. There were women from Trinidad, people from Hungary, and many other places. It was almost like a rock concert, there were definitely thousands of people there and when the pope drove in on his "pope-mobile" the crowd went wild. It was quite an experience.

WE didn't stay for the service, basically as soon as the pope had given the blessing, we headed over to the sistine chapel. All I can say is WOW! What a glorious and beautiful place. To get to the sistine chapel you actually7 have to walk through the vatican museum - rooms and rooms of paintings and tapestries so beautiful; you could spend the day examining the detail in any of them. It was glorious. Rooms and rooms of murals by artist like Rapheal that depict events in the Bible. It was so neat. The sistine chapel was all that it held up to be: overwhelmingly beautiful. You can't take pictures, but Michealangelo's scenes will be forever imprinted on my mind. The creation of man, the last supper and every story in the Bible in between seemed to have a place on the walls in the church. And marble floors, ancient and beautiful, rich in colour and worn so that you could actually feel beneath your feet the grooves between the marble. Go. All I can say is go and see this place some time in your life.
After the chapel we tried to get into St. Peter's basilica (big vatican church where they hold services) but the line was too long. So we went and wandered the streets instead. We saw the Pantheon (a former Roman temple to the god Romulus that had been converted to a church); a beautiful and huge fountain that had been sculpted by Benini in the 1500s; a beautiful old church, all made of marble where Andrea Bocelli had performed and Michelangelo's Christ stood; and all sorts of other amazing buildings and coman architecture we came across. It was truly an experience.

The second day we spent in "old Rome". We visited the Colliseum, which was huge. Amazing, interesting, huge. Then we visited the ruins and the Palantine (right next to the Colliseum, a former residence to Senators and other important people in the Roman community). What was so interesting about these sites is that they were right in the middle of town. You jumped off the subway, walked up to ground level and there they were, the colliseum, the ruins, surrounded by modern buildings. Both of these sites were very interesting and breathtaking. So neat.
After the ruins we went to find Circo Massimo, the site where chariot races supposedly took place (think Ben Hur). We wandered for quite a while, and when we finally found it, what a let down! It was just a bare field witha bit of a dirt track and a few ruins at one end. We had to laugh.
After Circo Massimo we caught a bus to the outskirts of town where we went to explore the catacombs of San (can't remember the rest of the name). These were the graves of ~half a million Christians (many martyrs and a few popes were buried there) from the time of the Roman Empire. This was another location where we couldn't take pictures, but it was very neat. All of the bones in the area we were touring had been relocated into a lower chamber of the catacombs.

On the way back to town, we accidentally took the wrong bus further out of town, so what should have taken about 20 minutes ended up taking over an hour. But it was an adventure. Our last stop was trying again to get into St. Peter's Basilica at the Vatican. Since we hadn't planned to go, I had worn a tank top, and apparently the dress code is fairly modest. However, we thought my shirt was modest enough, but we were wrong. When we got to the "screening point" at St. Peter's, I got turned away because I didn't have something to cover my shoulders with. So while Sherri and Denise when in, I had to stand and wait for them. It was pretty surprising actually how many people they turned away. It made me sad, that a church would turn people away based on what they were wearing. Sherri had worn a tank top under her t-shirt, so once she was done she came out and gave me her t-shirt. I went to go back in and they tried to say my skirt was too short (when it was about an inch above my knee!!) and I gave them a look of exasperation, so they let me pass. :P St. Peter's was beautiful, probably one of the biggest and nicest I've seen, but I didn't feel in awe or happy - I was saddened that this building housed practices of judgement, that a person could be turned away based on what they wore.

Overall Rome was a good experience. We got back to our hostel, grabbed a panini at the paniniria down the street and then headed to catch a night train to Nice France. Beaches here we come!!! :)