We flew from Prague to Rome on Thursday, the 27th. Throughout the trip we made our way from Rome to Florence - took a trip to Castiglion Florentino to visit our friends studying in this hill town outside of Florence - took a little trip to Pisa - then went from Florence to Venice and Venice back to Rome - and we got back to Prague last night at about 11:30 after our flight was delayed for a little over an hour. Four of us went - Laura and I and two of our friends that are studying here with us from K-state - Chris and Carl. We had a great time.
There have been a lot of holidays here in Prague over the last week so we didn't really miss too much school... so that is always good. We basically did all the major tourist sighseeing in all the cities, but I'll give a review. Of course, now it is high season in Italy, so there were all kinds of tourists all over the place.
When we arrived in Rome, it took a little while to find the hostel and carting our backpacks around on our backs is quite tiring, so we took it easy and found a restaurant nearby our hostel. Our hostel was in a good location - really close to the train station, so that was nice. We stayed at Yellow Hostel - it is a pretty good size hostel. I highly recommend it to anyone looking for a hostel in Rome - it was very clean and had a good free breakfast in the restaurant next to it. So we headed to a restaurant for our very first real Italian meal - I got quite excited that I was having Italian food in Italy!
The next morning we woke up really early to go to the Vatican and St. Peter's Basilica. We walked around the area and ended up going into St. Peter's first...so by the time we got out of there the line for the Vatican was huge, so we passed that up and saved it for the next day. St. Peter's was amazing. It is just huge and so beautiful! Since we got there so early it was really nice in there and not crowded with people yet. There was mass going on in all these different areas of the church in all different languages. I walked past one and realized it was in English, so Laura and I stopped for mass there- that was pretty cool. With the morning sun rising, rays of light were shooting in through the front of the church and it was quite a scene. We headed up to the dome of St. Peter's and got a good look at the vatican and all of Vatican City. After all of this we grabbed some breakfast and headed to some more sites. We went to the Pantheon, which is an amazing building that we learned so much about in our history of architecture classes we took in our first couple years at kstate. Being in Italy was amazing for us because we had heard so much about all of it. We had seen everything on slides in class, but never quite imagined being at these places.. so the feeling was a bit surreal! The Pantheon has a circular sky light at the top of the dome and this is the only light coming in besides the doorway so when it is sunny out, there is an amazing ray of light that comes through. We also saw the Trevi Fountain. We went through the Piazza Navona that has another famous fountain in it - Fountain of the Four Rivers. We got a little lost on the way to the Spanish Steps and ended up in a huge plaza, but we had no idea what it was. We ended up finding it is called the Quarinale, but it wasn't too impressive and it appeared to us that it was a haven of lost tourists. Well, we realized we were headed in the completely wrong direction and made our way to the Spanish Steps. By this time we were getting pretty exhausted, so we relaxed there for a little while - walked around there some more and decided we would take the metro back to the hostel to rest. Well, when we found a metro stop we went down and it took us on this winding path through these tunnels and we ended up coming out of the tunnel without ever finding the metro. So we sat for awhile a bit confused, then decided to head back in for another look and we saw the metro area, but it was blocked off by a gate! It was 3:30 in the afternoon! A man walked by and said it didn't open until 5:00. So Laura and I grabbed some gelato - our first of the trip - but definitely not the last of the trip! Gelato is one of the best things ever - it's ice cream but so much better and they serve it EVERYWHERE in Italy - basically every corner will have a gelato store. Well we finally walked our way back to the hostel. (It turns out there was a strike by the transportation workers going on that day - or something like that - still not quite sure) We took a nice, long nap and then headed out for some dinner. This night took us to a rather disappointing restaurant...the food was just a little bit interesting. We got over it though.
Saturday was another early morning, but not quite as early because we wanted to get our free breakfast from the hostel. So we had our breakfast and headed to the Vatican. We waited in line for about 2 hours. There were so many people in line! The line moved pretty fast, but it still took about 2 hours. Inside the Vatican there was just like a herd of people moving through. It was really amazing, though. The paintings on the walls in all the rooms were incredible and they were painted by incredible people. It was a maze to the sistine chapel. The whole time we were following this sign with an arrow that said "sistine chapel", but it kept taking us through all these other rooms, but finally we got there and it was awesome. My neck started hurting from staring straight up for so long, but it was very cool. After the Vatican we headed to the Colloseum area. This area has a lot to see. The Capitol is around here, a massive building called the Victor Emmanuel II Memorial where the Tomb of the Uknown Soldier is, the Roman Forum (a huge area full of ruins), the Arch of Constantine, and the Colloseum. I'm sure I'm missing many things in there, but those are most of the big ones. So we walked through this huge area wishing we had our history teacher with us to remind us of everything he had told us before.
We didn't do a whole lot the rest of the day, but it had definetely been a full day by then. It is hard to squeeze Rome in to 2 days and there is still plenty we didn't get the chance to see.
So Sunday we headed to Florence and Florence was definitely my favorite. I'll get back to that though in a bit!
Some pics.. but I've posted all my pics on my Flickr page
First Italian meal
Inside the Pantheon
Vatican City
St. Peter's Basilica
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