Rome – Day 2

As always, there are more pictures in the Flickr gallery for my trip than I’ve actually posted here–I’m trying to just cover the highlights here. :-)

I think my biggest complaint about anything this whole trip was the hotel beds. On our second day in Rome (our first morning), I woke up and announced to John and Joel! that I thought the hotel had made a mistake–they gave me the box spring to sleep on, and someone else had the actual mattress. I mean, literally, there were dents in the sheets from the pattern of the mattress springs. That’s how thin that thing was.

After I massaged out the bedspring dents from my shoulder and hip, we got up and got our free breakfast from our hotel at a cafe next to the hotel. Breakfast in Rome is, like “close to Termini”, a relative term–a croissant and a small cup of coffee. I’m not a big fan of either, but when in Rome (ha ha ha), so I ate it anyway. After that, we hoofed it down to the Colosseum, where we had tickets for 9AM (if you buy tickets online, which we did in order to avoid lines, they make you designate a start time, in order to help manage crowds.) 10 minutes later, when we were almost to… Joel, where were we going? The train station? Anyway, we were 15 minutes from our hotel, supposed to be at the Colosseum in 15 minutes, and I realized that I had forgotten my wallet, which had the ID I needed to pick up the tickets. WHOOPS. Fortunately, I was with two wonderful guys, who not only didn’t get irritated with me, but ordered me to stop beating myself up over it. We pretty much ran back to the hotel, ran back to Termini, and hopped a Metro down to the Colosseum. We were about 15 minutes late by that time, but the lady at the ticket desk was nice and let us in anyway. WHEW!

Do I need to say again how much I loved that wide-angle lens? :-)

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Colosseum Cat is watching you travel. (I'm still surprised he let me get two feet away to take this picture of him!)

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That's the Palatine Hill and Roman Forum in the background -- we went there right after the Colosseum. Hanging around our necks are audioguides so we could hear more about what we were seeing (that's why we all are wearing headphones in the pictures.) Yaay for being tourists!

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After we finished wandering around the Colosseum, we headed over to the Palatine Hill and Roman Forum to wander amidst and contemplate the ruins for a while.

Joel! and John contemplating the ruins. Either that, or they were just feeling the jet lag. Probably the latter, given that it was about 5 AM in CA and 9PM in Hong Kong.

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So I only actually got two pictures of the three of us together, and this was one of them. I may have to do some photoshopping so that we have a couple more. :-) From left, Joel, me, and John (with something apparently growing out of his head.)

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You know the old saying about how “all roads lead to Rome”? Well, to be more specific, they lead right here — the Temple of Saturn, the remnants of which are the columns on the left of the picture. That temple was mile 0 in the Roman Road system. Also, check out old and the new — another new building built right on top of an old one (look at the foundation of the building on the right.)

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After the Roman Forum, we took a bus over to St. Peter’s Square, where we sat and had lunch and one of us might have inadvertently fed some saltine crumbs to some pigeons. :innocentlook: Something that caught me off-guard a couple of years ago when I went to Rome was the public drinking fountains. They don’t always look like drinking fountains (like we’d think of them, anyway) and they don’t turn off–they continuously pour water into a drain. It seems like a waste to me, but I suppose there’s logic to their method somehow. Anyway, since I somehow became the group water carrier during the trip, I usually made one of the guys at least fill up the bottle, so here’s Joel! filling it at a fountain in St. Peter’s Square.

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After St. Peter’s Square, we headed over to the Vatican Museum, because, like the Colosseum, we had to be there at a certain time. Unlike the Colosseum, however, we actually made it 15 minutes early. I think I was trying to atone for my goof earlier in the day. :-)

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There are tons of famous old paintings here, and a lot of them are actually painted right on the walls themselves. This one is the Donation of Constantine, on the wall of the Hall of Constantine inside the Apostolic Palace.

What I like about this one is the the artist painted himself into it. Look closely and see if you can find him. See the end of this post for a hint if you give up. :-)

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Another famous one — Rafael’s The School of Athens. John and I got cornered by an apparently bored American art history major, who proceeded to spend almost ten minutes filling us in on this one. It was pretty interesting, actually.

Again, wide angle lens for the win -- I would have had to have my back pressed against the back wall to be able to get this whole shot without it.

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All these things were leading up to the thing I was looking forward to the most — the Sistine Chapel! Yeah, I was here a couple of years ago. I was still really really looking forward to going back, and this time taking my time to sit and check the place out. I wasn’t disappointed — it was even better the second time! Oh, and, er, no… you’re not supposed to take pictures. These were accidentally taken when my camera just happened to be sitting in my knee, turned on and with the lens cap off. Funny how that works.  I’m actually surprised at how well they turned out, given that I couldn’t actually look to aim any of them…

Things that take your breath away. This one is definitely worth clicking on the picture to see the larger version.

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Kind of a famous picture. :-) If you check out my Flickr gallery, I have a few more pictures of the Sistine Chapel there.

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The intrepid travelers. This is the only picture we have of all three of us... Oh well. :-)

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Fountain outside of the Vatican Museum.

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Vatican Museum stairwell, looking down.

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Vatican Museum stairwell, looking up.

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After we finished in the museum, we went back around the outside of the wall to St. Peter’s Basilica, the largest Christian church in the world, so that we could go inside the church and see what there was to see. Incidentally, it was the building of St. Peter’s Basilica that sparked the beginning of the Reformation. As beautiful and amazing as this place is, honestly, I still vastly prefer Westminster Abbey in London. Even with all of its Gothic splendor, it’s still somehow much more simple and peaceful than St. Peter’s — there’s something about all of the colored granite and gold in St. Pete’s that distracts me from the idea that it’s actually a church, whereas in Westminster, that thought was never far from my mind.

Church service in St. Peter's Basilica. The guys in red are cardinals, and the figures in blue are nuns.

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Trying to figure out which bus to take to get home.

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After St. Pete’s, we walked down to the Ponte Sant’Angelo because I wanted to  check out the river at night, and although my traveling companions were tired, they’re both nice enough guys to humor my whim.

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Bicyclist turning onto the Ponte Sant'Angelo, with Castel Sant'Angelo in the background.

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Around 6PM, we decided to call it an evening, and headed back toward our hotel in search of food and sleep. Tomorrow morning we’d be up early to catch a train to Pompeii and parts south, and that’ll be tomorrow’s blog post! :-)

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**Where’s the artist in the painting hiding? Look at the bottom right corner of the painting–he’s the one dressed in Renaissance garb while everyone else is dressed in a more classical style.