Roman Holiday

Rome was awesome!! It was really crazy how old everthing was, for example we would just be walking down a random street in what we thought was part of the newer city, and stumble upon some random excavation site with ancient ruins. On our first day here we dropped our bags off at our hostel and pretty much just ran straight to the Colosseum and the ancient part of the city. Jon, you were right, we just wanted to take pictures of everything... unfortunately our camera was not up to the task. We learned that the Colosseum in the early years used to sometimes be flooded so they could hold mock naval battles. After the Colosseum we jumped over to Palentine Hill which holds most of the ruins of ancient Rome. We were able to see the house of Augustus, the Roman Forum, and many other cool pieces of architecture that we were amazed still existed after over 2000 years. Maybe the coolest and most impressive structure in Rome was the Pantheon. It was commissioned as a temple to all of the Roman Gods 2000 years ago and still stands fully intact today, which is incredible because of its size and the construction of the dome. It was rather extrordinary. It was funny because when we arrived at our hostel, the owner, Giovanni, who is the funniest little Italian man, told us when we asked about the metro, yelled, "No metro! In Rome you need NO metro! Romans, we walk everywhere!" And that was that. We walked all the way down to the Southern part of Rome so that Erica could pretend that she was Audrey Hepurn in "Roman Holiday" at the Mouth of Truth, which legend has it, will rip your arm off if you have told a lie. She still has both of her arms, as do I. We split our journey into the Vatican into two days, just because it is so massive and there is so much to see, and also because the late July heat really takes it out of you by 1pm. Hence, our excitement in the picture when we had just been handed FREE water. On the first day, we went into St. Peter's Basillica and the mausoleum. On the second day we went to the Vatican museum and into the Sistine Chapel, which was amazing and beautiful. We both agree that it is not quite what we expected- it was not jaw-dropping, but it was more beautiful and we liked it much more than we thought we would. The picture belowis of the Vatican guards whose costumes were designed by Leonardo Di Vinci. We have determined that it was a joke he decided to play on the Vatican by designing those outfits. The picture in front of the fountain is in the main courtyard of the Vatican where citizens wait to watch the smoke and hear the announcement of a new pope. Rome is awsome, hot, but awesome.