Vatcian City and Sistine Chapel

Today we went to the Sistine Chapel. We were prepared to stand in a long line if we needed to. It was really hot today again (probably 90 degrees?) so we weren't looking forward to a line. There were people asking everyone if they wanted to skip the line and get a proper tour. They were legit tours through companies, they were just expensive! We misunderstood a guy that told us that we could get a two hour english tour through the museums (second largest in the world to the Louvre), and skip the line, all for 40 euro. He meant 40 euro each. That was a pretty steep price, and we didn't doubt that we would appreciate the tour more if we understood what we were seeing, but it wasn't worth the month to us.

We stood in line for about an hour, a lot less than my guidebook warned us of (which was 4 hours). And about half of it was in the shade of the building, which was also good. I brought along a scarf to cover my shorts up when we went inside, since I didn't want to wear jeans again. With our student discounts we got in for 8 euros each. Much better, especially for people like us, who get a bit antsy in museums :)

One of the courtyards that we walked through

View out one of the windows of Rome

Some artwork on the ceiling

Statue of Homer

Socrates (these we were able to find out who they were based on the number coding and a chart in the room that decoded the numbers on every piece of art. Unfortunately, not all the rooms had the chart to decode the numbers though)

This room was actually designed based on the Pantheon. Yeah...I have a picture just like it from there...

There were statues everywhere. It was hard to get a look at stuff too because of the steady stream of people pushing their way to the Sistine Chapel. It's kind of a one way ticket through the museum, so if something caught our eye, we had to jump out of the stream to see it

Mosaic pictures on the floor

Lots and lots of paintings on the ceiling. There were also paintings of curtains on the edge of doorways which I thought was pretty cool (but I didn't get a picture of...)

They had a net under this part of the ceiling because it was cracking and looked like pieces might fall. Oh no!

Hall of tapestries

Carvings on the ceilings

This ceiling had carvings and paintings on it. It was really impressive to walk down

More paintings in a dome

Then we got to the Sistine Chapel. I'm sure I'd seen pictures of what it looked like, but I didn't remember and didn't have a picture in my head of what it was supposed to look like. Yet it didn't look like how I thought it would. I thought the Creation of Adam was on the inside of a dome. But clearly it's not. And it's not as big as you'd expect since it's such a famous painting. We weren't supposed to take pictures inside, but I just had to (and everyone else was). At least I didn't have the flash on. But here you can see the Creation of Adam, in the middle. I can't imagine painting that. They say Michelangelo never did recover from painting the Sistine Chapel.

Aristotle

Cool stairs to get out

After our visit to the Sistine Chapel we were pretty hungry. (Poor Doug was hungry the entire time). So we found a place that was doing a deal where you got a pizza, salad, coke, and gelato for 10 euros each. We thought that was worth it, since we wouldn't get a lower price if we tried to buy those items separately. They serve their salads here with olive oil. I don't really like it. (Where's the Italian dressing?). All you taste is the oil and by itself it's not that great. When mixed with spices and vinegars and such it's great. The pizza was good though. And the gelato too. But still not as good as our ice cream. I keep telling Doug he's not missing out on much (the kind they served was vanilla so he couldn't have it since it has milk), but I don't think he believes me.

We're kind of done with Rome now. At least with the big stuff. This afternoon we tried to get to a mall to find some DVDs to watch at night. I use the word try even though we did make it to the mall, just because the effort was crazy. We took the metro and had to change from one line to the other (they only have 2), and then had to take a bus to the mall. There were supposedly 3 different buses that would get us there, but we could only find one number on the bus stop that we found, so we waited for that one. We finally got on that bus and rode it to the mall.

The mall was really pretty actually and I was surprised to see they have a Hollister here. We did get two DVDs that were on sale: Angels and Demons and Dragon Trainer (How to Train Your Dragon). We watched Angels and Demons on our honeymoon and Doug kept remembering parts of it on our tour of Rome, so he was wanting to see it again. And we just liked How to Train Your Dragon.

We found our bus to get back to the metro station, and then took that to the Colosseum, where we walked up to catch our usual bus back to the road near our hotel. We had a guy on the metro who performed karaoke. He even sang "Billy Jean." It's just crazy how long it takes you to get across the city on public transportation. In London and Paris it would take maybe 15 minutes on a metro? Here you have to really plan out the trip and know which buses you can take. Our mall trip took about 4 hours, and we were only at the mall for about 45 minutes.

We got back to the hotel around 6:30, and the pool would only be open till 7. So we skipped it and just got cleaned up instead. Doug went and got us McDonalds and then we watched Angels and Demons. It was really fun seeing all of the sites in Rome on the t.v. and thinking "We were there" and "We could go there right now if we wanted to!"

Now it's pretty late, so I should get to bed. We're not sure what we're going to do tomorrow. But we'll let you know then :)

Oh, and we found Doug a hat today! So now we both have one!