Roma 3: Il Vaticano

I already feel myself losing steam on this blogging stuff, but I'm losing steam on a lot of things. It might be because it's so freaking hot here right now I can't hear myself think. Also, I'm running out of pictures.

Day 3 we had a scheduled tour of Vatican City. I guess I wasn't sure what to expect. All of my Vatican City information comes from Angels and Demons and the Borgias. We had breakfast in the garden of the hotel. I had some wonderful pastries, fresh fruit, and coffee. (They steam the milk that they give you for in the coffee so it's all warm and yummy...love that!) Then we walked (of course we did) over the Tibre river towards Vatican City. We met up with our tour guide and went in the Vatican Museums, Sistine Chapel and St. Peter's Basilica. We saw lots of art by Michelangelo and Raphael and possibly other Ninja Turtles. I'm not really an art person, but it was interesting to hear all the details about the Sistine Chapel like how halfway through the people painted get bigger because you originally couldn't see the people in the first three panels clearly from the floor or how there's controversy over the fact that Adam is painted with a belly button or that Michelangelo basically had one saint doing another saint in the ass until someone made it more P.C....crazy Michelangelo...don't you know St. Catherine preferred the Cowgirl position? omg...I am so going to hell. My little brain sensor guy must've stayed in Italy.

After we saw Vatican City, we walked to a little neighborhood nearby where my mom had mapped a gelato stand that was supposed to be one of the best in Rome. She mapped out the best gelato stands near all the attractions we were scheduled to see. My mom has always tried to help me reach all my goals...Gelato goal shouldn't be any different, should it? Wonder if she knew about my gondolier goal? First we decided to eat actual food (I'm sorry, gelato, for insinuating that you are not actual food...you're better than actual food. you are). We ordered two pizzas (one pizza is supposed to serve one person, but they were HUGE). One of them was a white pizza with four cheeses, and the second was margarita pizza (tomato and mozzarella). Both delicious. At this point, my dad and I decided that Italy should just produce the food for the entire world. Then of course, there was gelato, crema gelato. We walked up to a church on a hill to have an overview of Rome. It was ok. I'm not big on the see things from up high thing. As we started walking back down this hill, it started drizzling a little bit and the sky got dark, so we decided to head back towards the hotel and just see things along the way. There was a church on the way (there's churches on the way everywhere in Rome) and by this time the sky was back to being blue and beautfiul so we sat on the steps outside the church for a while. We started to walk back towards the hotel again and suddenly the sky opened up, and there was a torrential downpour. We found a spot on the large porch of a Chinese import store and just hung out until the storm passed and watched street vendors trying to hawk umbrellas. Probably about a half hour.

Continuing the walk (wow, there is like a lot of walking going on in this post), we found a place to eat. In the restaurant beside our table was a giant TV showing Italian MTV. It was kinda weird. Most of the videos I had never seen before, but then JLo came on. Glad the US can contribute something to the world. I had gnocchi with 4 cheese sauce (wow, lots of cheeses today too). It was good, but really rich. We also decided that Italian bread sucks unless it is drenched in olive oil because it doesn't have any salt in it. We continued back to the hotel and went to the pool.