Day Eleven: 5/3
This morning we got up late. We did not get
up late because we wanted to. At 1:30am some people decided to play music and
sing. This kept us up until 2am. Ugh!
Security finally came by and shot them! Just kidding, they only quieted them
down and we were able to finally get to sleep.
After we recovered from our lack of sleep, we took the metro to The
Vatican. Angie was totally lost with directions, but we finally got there. We
took a tour of The Vatican Museum as well as the Sistine Chapel.
The tour of the Vatican reminded us of the lines at Disneyland. You would enter one room, and be forced to leave out another
exit. You then had to follow a line of
people. They routed you all over the
place, before you were herded into the chapel.
So for someone who wanted to see a specific thing, they had to go
through all of the other rooms first.
The Sistine
Chapel was very impressive. It was
very hard to enjoy the beauty of this room because of the massive amount of
people here. Plus every couple of
minutes, some employee would yell at a tourist for taking pictures. That was not very Christian of them. I was able to sneak some photos on my
camera. I guess I am going to Hell, or
at least that is how they made you feel about taking pictures.
After touring The Vatican, we had lunch at
The Vatican cafeteria. Lunch was pretty
good and the prices were very reasonable.
After The Vatican, we headed over to Saint Peters Basilica. We
walked through the church. They had the body of a Pope bronzed and on display.
Hope he doesn't need that body later! Okay, now we are really going to Hell!
During our tour of the Basilica, we saw a very unusual site. We looked out one window and saw this
amazing water fall and pool. With the
naked eye it was too small to see. I
had the zoom on my digital camera all the way up and had to really steady the
camera to get this shot. It was
incredible and very out of place here.
We were totally lost in Vatican City and could not find our way back to
the Metro. Instead we just decided to
walk back towards the hotel. We sure are getting a lot of exercise. We walked along the Tiber. We stopped at the
Villa Borghese. There was a
cool lake and lots of couples sitting together on the 
benches. This was a very beautiful park. The lake had a really nice
gazebo in the middle of it. While we
walked around the lake we saw some turtles and fish in the lake. The water was pretty clear, so I could get a
good picture of them.
We also passed the Trajan Market along the way.
We walked back to the hotel for a nap. We
were both tired out from all the walking today. We woke up for dinner. We
walked down our street and found a nice looking Italian restaurant (in Rome, go
figure!). We ate at Restaurante Vecchia Roma. The food and service here was
fantastic. We were sitting on a main
street, but we had romantic music to drown out the street noise. We were
serenaded in Italian and then in English. This was the perfect end to a perfect
dinner. If you find yourself in Rome,
please do try to have dinner here, you will not regret it. After dinner we had
strawberries and sherbet for dessert.
We walked back to the hotel after dinner.