When in Rome...

No Ron, that doesn't work here..wait, actually it does...(this anchorman quote goes out to all my french buddies who I miss so much already, this was the last movie we watched together...sad). So as you may have guessed, this is the story of our stay in Rome. It started out kinda rocky. We arrived late and had half and hour to check into our hostel before our spot was given up (somthing about absolutly no checkins after 6pm w/o calling first but we didnt' have the number..you know, the usual). So we prayed, Lord take us to our hostel in time, we don't have any directions (oops, forgot to write those down) or a map, but we know you can get us there. And like the guardian He is, the second we walked off the platform a man approached us and started speaking english. He asked if we had a place to stay (he was a walking info dude). We gave him the address and he traced our route on a map and sent us in the right direction. Needless to say, we got there in time. When we got there we found out that we apparently only booked the one night, not two. This is very bad because online almost everywhere was booked for the time we planned on coming. We were lucky to find this place. But God was watching out for us, and as it turns out our beds happened to be vacent the next night so booked it right away. The hostel itself was a little sketchy but you get to the point where you're expectations aren't real high after traveling for awhile. The shower was a shower head on the wall in the bathroom with a hole in the ground a couple feet from the toilet for the water to drain. But the water pressure was excellent, so I had no complaints. Our room door had only one key that you share with everyone so you have to drop it off and pick it up at the desk everytime. For some reason we could never open the door on our own. We had to ask the dude at the desk everytime. He either thought we were crazy or that we liked him. Oh well.

Now for the exciting stuff. The first night we saw a lot. We walked to the Colesseum, explored the Forum, wandered by the Panetheon and stumbled upone some famous fountains (of which I already forgot the names, but they were cool). Everything was huge. Columns were everywhere, often chillin out and not holding anything up. We soaked it all in. The history there is unbelievable. You can't even comprehend it. You just take in as much as you can. We hit up some more gelato, it was stellar. By the way, hazulnut (the nut used in nutella with chocolate which is the euro version of peanutbutter) and chocolate gelato mixed is a close rival to my old favorite chocolate peanutbutter at Madison. Nothing has come close before. So thats how good it is.

The next morning we made it out to the Vatican before 8 (to beat the crowds) and we stil lwaited another 2 hours in line before we could go in. They had statues galore. We saw cool scenes painted by Rapheal. But the piece de la resistance, as you may have guessed, was seeing the Sistine Chapel. For some reason, I just thought it was a dome or something. I don't know, I was stupid. It's actually a chapel, and a pretty big one at that. The walls and ceiling were covered with Biblical scenes. From the ceiling you could trace the Bible from creation (the famous God man finger touch), Adam and Eve, the flood, all the way through David, Jonah, to John the Baptist and then the scenes of Christ. (i'll finish this post if I ever find my red notebook!)