i'm not gonna lie, rome is pretty great

howdy y'all

lisa and i are in rome today! it is about 10 at night and we are just about to go home for dinner. we are going to have bread, crackers, cheese and some spicy spread, along with a bottle of italian wine, on our 3rd floor balcony. hopefully it will be as nice as it sounds. its kind of late but we had a big and kind of weird day. i will get to that later.

we got here on monday afternoon, and since we were pretty hot, we hung out in our air conditioned room for a while. our hotel is cute and nice and small, and we really like the people who run it, they are very nice! the only sketchy part is that occasionally there are people sleeping on benches outside of the locked gates... hmmm. its not overly boiling here, but its like summer-in-ontario-temperature, so at 2 o clock in the afternoon, you will sweat just standing around. gross! anyways, by the time we were functional, it was around 5 and we wanted to explore, so we walked past the train station, down the street, and saw RUINS! yay! the ruins are cool, and they are definitely the most ruined ruins that we have seen so far. some buildings have a lot left remaining, but sometimes there is just a foundation, or half of a pillar. the magnitude and number and variety of arches is spectacular! they used arches to hold EVERYTHING up, its so cool. i wonder if they would have ever discovered tension if the roman empire kept going forever. its not like they seemed to need it. (sorry for that nerdy aside)

we climbed a hill and looked out over the ruins and got our fill (for now), before walking back up the street a little ways for dinner. after dinner we went to the other end of the ruins to look at the coliseum. now, we thought that the amphitheatre in arles was big, but this one deserves its awesome reputation! its so spectacular, 4 stories of round, and you can look on it all at once and from far enough away that you can take it all in. i love it! the sun was starting to go down, so we experimented with camera settings for a while and then got tea and coffee at an appropriately overpriced cafe where we could see the coliseum. we sat there and breathed it all in for about an hour. at that point we looked in the seafood display next to us and a lobster was wriggling around so we took off pretty fast and went back to our hotel.

the next morning, we got up for a delicious breakfast at our hotel. three cheers for nutella! lisa and i decided to get all of the churches out of the way at the beginning, and although we fell short of our ambitious goal of 5, we feel like we saw the 2 best ones, 2 of the best in the world i'm sure. we went to San Giovanni in the morning, a gorgeous church that is apparently the home of the church in Rome. there was marble and gold and statues everywhere, it was mindblowing!

next we went to vatican city. we waited for 40 minutes in line next to a huge city wall to get into the spectacular vatican museums. i can't even describe the stuff thats in there. i dont know if i should try.... okay i will. hmm. its like the church has so much treasure and they don't know what to do with it all, so they store some of it in long hallways that are painted incredibly beautiful by the best painters, because who would turn down an invitation to paint a big room in the vatican? not raphael, and certainly not michaelangelo. his sistine chapel is nice!

after about an hour of looking at all of this stuff our minds were blown so we wandered through the rest of it like zombies and got a couple of drinks. then we went to st. peters basilica, passing a bunch of people in a fenced off area who were not clothed appropriately enough to get in. haha! we thought that san giovanni was awesome, but this was at a totally different level. its huge, its ornate, there is gold and awesome marble everywhere, and all kinds of huge statues. we spent about an hour in there, just staring.

then we went home and showered before going to see an ENGLISH MOVIE! wooo! its been a long time coming, but its unfortunate that the only one that we could find was the new fantastic 4 movie. i still can't believe its a movie. if you haven't seen it, dont. cheeeeeese!

today we dedicated the morning to ruins. we went down to the floor of the ruins and got up close and personal with some pretty old stuff! its funny how they have every block catalogued, even random chunks of marble that fell off who-knows-what. we wandered to the end and went into the coliseum, which we explored for about an hour. its pretty impressive, and even more impressive that its so intact after 2000 years!

we took some groceries up to the top of a hill with lots of ruins on it and had a nice picnic underneath some trees. we explored the ruins on top of the hill until lisa fought a ruin and lost. lol. she tripped a little and the ruin sliced her toe open, so we had to do some serious first aid. lisa sat on block # 378265 while i tended to her wound. we took the subway home and before we knew it we had had a nap and it was 5:30.

we intended to visit the pantheon today but apparently it was closed due to some national holiday that is today. oh well, we will do it later. instead we went to a nice little market and had dessert on the bank of the tiber river. we are just on our way home from that now, and i am hungry so i am going now!

ciao!
simon