The Last Post

I'm home. I've been home for awhile. We had gorgeous weather for the last day in Germany and even the flight was nice enough to be fairly uneventful.

So first, the three biggest changes or things that have been hard to adjust to since coming back.
1. Tax: Germany includes tax in everything already. I keep trying to buy things here with the exact change ready. That doesn't work.

2. I hear English everywhere and it strikes me as really weird. I guess I was used to speaking English still since I hung out with other Americans, but around me everything was still in German and now it isn't.

3. The little words... common words like excuse me "Entschuldigung" and thank you "Danke" still slip out because you say them all the time.


The top six things I've really missed about the US and was glad to come home to.
1. Free tap water. Never underestimate free tap water in restaurants. Having to pay for water is extremely annoying and really expensive over there as well. On top of that, it's often carbonated.

2. Drink choices. Germany has a million juice choices, but other than that, the choices are slim. Coke, Diet Coke, Fanta, Sprite. I very much missed mountain dew and root beer and I really missed lemonade (Germany's version is carbonated) for the days when I didn't want bubbles in my drink!

3. Free bathrooms. I'm not sure if paying for water or bathrooms is more annoying. Even going into many restaurants, there's still a required tip to get to the toilets.

4. 24/7. Not that I need to go to Walmart at 3 am on a Sunday, but it's really annoying to run out of milk Saturday night at 9 pm and realize you're out of luck until Monday morning at 9 am, meaning no cereal for the next two days. Sunday is a great day to run errands, and after 8 pm there are still several hours where it's appreciated to be able to do some shopping...

5. Food. I love German food (this features on the next list) but I missed pancakes with syrup, soft chocolate chip cookies, actual spicy food (German's have two taste buds, sweet and salty... spicy is a foreign concept to them), Mexican food...

6. German Efficiency (this being a thing I won't miss). The country thinks it's so incredibly efficient but it kills me to watch. Everything they do (especially anything involving lines and people-to-people services) takes 3 times as long as it would in the US. I don't understand it but it's the most incredibly annoying thing ever.



Top six things I will greatly miss about Germany and appreciated there:
1. The food. Specifically, knödel, spätzel, sausages in baguettes, German breads, fresh mozzarella sandwiches, Currywurst, pretzels, Butter pretzels...

2. The Euro- I much prefer the fun and colorful sizes of the Euro compared to the long and skinny green dollar. Also, US coins are so thin! It's unbelievable. They're so light they don't seem like they could be worth anything!

3. Getting textbooks out of the library. So much cheaper and such a better idea. $100+ for a book I'm going to use for 4 months? Really? And this on top of our tuition?

4. Traveling all around Europe on the weekend. Cheap plane rides to Pisa and Barcelona, and hostels to stay in... It's a much more travel friendly environment when you don't have to rent a car and a hotel room. And when everything's so close together.

5. The German school system. I admit at first I was wary of Germany's final exam counts for the entire grade. I actually missed the weekly homework and monthly midterms to make sure I was ontrack and knew what I was supposed to be learned. But after two semesters of it, I really appreciate it. It allows you to learn at your own pace. Struggling with homework doesn't cause you to lose points early on. I appreciated the extra time I had on my evenings and the weekends so I could travel and take part in things around Munich that I would never have had the time to do in the US. I'm not excited to going back to 5 hours of class followed by 8 hours of homework and studying every day.

6. Public Transportation. Not that parts of the US don't have it, but Munich has it down. I loved taking the subway everywhere. It was so easy. There was no need for a car. Between the subway, trams and buses coming every 10 minutes, there was always a connection to where I needed to go.


Anyway, tomorrow I head off to Urbana-Champaign to start my junior year. The Germany chapter is over. I'll leave you with a few last pictures. The first two are my room. I'd managed to quite personalize it by the end. The last is me in my drindl. :) It's the typical Bavarian dress and we found them on sale so us girls bought them for Halloween costumes.

But yeah, that's all for now. I hope you enjoyed following this blog. I appreciated the comments and support. In the end, I have to say, it was quite the year but it was worth it. So much about Munich/Germany/Europe is so different than my life in the US. There's a lot of these German/European ideas that I've adopted and appreciate much more than the American. Then again, there are a lot of things about Europe that just aren't home.

Florence... the last leg

Note: Pisa and Rome are in the wrong order... the correct order is Pisa, Rome, Florence.

So we got into Florence a bit late as it was. Then came the rush to find our bus tickets to the airport Monday morning. We were leaving at 3:30 and wanted to make sure we bought those in advance. We ran to tourist information but there was a very explicit sign on the door stating that if you needed bus or train info you should go to the window at platform 5. So we did. Along with everyone else. And got in line to wait. And wait. And wait. See there were 15 people in line and one person at the desk. And like an Italian, he was taking his time because there was no rush for him. So we waited. And waited. And waited. And finally an hour later (I should note that we were like the 6th or 7th in line when we got there), it was finally our turn. I asked if he spoke English. He said a little. I explained we needed a bus at 3:30 am to the Pisa airport (I had done my research… I knew this existed). He gave me a 5 am train that got there 30 minutes before we took off. I shook my head. I said “bus”. I said “3 am”. He shook his head. He gave me a 12 am train that got to the airport at 2 am. Our flight left at 7 am. I shook my head. I repeated the bit about the bus and wrote the word down. He explained in half-Italian that we were in the wrong place and needed to somewhere else for bus tickets. Then he grabbed my paper and attempted to draw a map of where we needed to go. It was a very confusing map. It made only a little bit of sense. But we took it and left and randomly happened upon the bar he had told us to go to several blocks before we were supposed to get there. We enter. It’s a bar… but there’s a booth selling bus tickets. We walked up and I explained that I needed the 3:30 bus to the Pisa airport. He asked when the flight was in English. I told him. He gave us three tickets for the 3:35 bus and told us where to meet. It took 5 minutes. The entire ordeal had taken almost two hours. Thanks, Italy…
Due to all of that, it was already 5:00. We booked it to the hostel (a twenty minute walk) and found out, with great disappointment, that we had booked a hostel without air-conditioning in Florence as well. The rooms were miserably hot. Still, we dropped off our stuff, grabbed a map from the front desk and set out to explore. On the way we grabbed calzones for dinner (yummy) and then, since the churches all closed at 5:30 and it was almost 6, settled for going around the city. We found the city hall and the main plaza. It’s right next to the Uffizi Museum (one of the most famous galleries for Romantic art) and as a result there is an “outdoor gallery” as well right on the square. For those of you who I have taken around Munich, you surely remember the place where Hitler famously took power right across from the large yellow church. If you remember, I said that Ludwig I (the culture king) went around the world, saw things he liked and had them rebuilt in Munich. Well, that famous place where he took power (which I keep calling it because I don’t actually remember what it is called) is the thing he took from Florence. It’s a copy of where all these famous statues are at the main square. The main square also has a Neptune fountain and a copy (smaller) of Michelangelo’s David , that we were pretty sure most everyone thought was the real thing by the way they were snapping pictures. We knew better.
Anyway, from there we stopped by Dante’s house and then ended our night with gelato (if you haven’t caught on yet, we had decided to eat it every day… and Florence is even easier for that then Rome. There is seriously a gelato bar every other store. It is insane.) We walked around the river a bit, ending up by the Boboli gardens (which were closed and cost 10 Euro to get in anyway) and the Pitti Palace which had a nice square in front to sit and hang out until it got dark. Then we went back to the hostel to look up the sites we needed to see in the museums the next day. We had bought our tickets to the museums in advance to skip the lines and as a result got to choose the time we wanted to go. We opted for Uffizi (romantic art gallery) at 9:15 (earliest we could get) and the Academy (where the actual David is) at 2 in the afternoon. Then we headed off to sleep in the still hot and stuffy rooms. (By the way, Florence is considerably more humid than Rome or Pisa. This felt like St. Louis). The next morning we headed off to see art. The museum was pretty impressive, though not air-conditioned like I had assumed it would be. The famous works include Spring and The Birth of Venus by Botticelli (You’d recognize them if you saw them). We were out by 11 and used the time to go into the city hall (which had closed before we could the day before and was pretty cool) and grab gelato for lunch (yes, we know it wasn’t the healthiest but it was so tasty). I wanted to go in the massive Duomo (main city church, which also has a baptistery and a bell tower… must be an Italian thing) but there was no sight-seeing on Sunday, just mass. I had assumed we would try to go in right before the mass started to look around and then walk out. Unfortunately I thought mass was at 12:30. It was at 12:00. So when we showed up at 12:25 this was not an option. I still wanted to see the church though, so while Traci and Kristina went souvenir shopping, I decided to attend the second half of Italian mass. Ironically the inside of the church itself was not all that impressive though it did have a pretty cool dome and mosaic floors, and of course, was huge.
Anyway, afterwards we walked over to the Medici house and chapel. The Medici family was the “ruling” family in Florence (or at least the ones with the power) and largely responsible for the start of the Renaissance, which was born in Florence. Then we headed up to the Academy to see David and were ushered in even though we were 20 minutes early. Wow. That’s all I can say. We had been told David was bigger than you expect. He was. He’s like 20 feet tall. They have a photograph in the atrium when you walk in that they took candidly of the hall where David is. Everyone is just gaping at him. It was pretty impressive. Unfortunately, that’s pretty much all there is in the museum. There is a hall of other Michelangelo works but they are all his unfinished projects. The only other highlight was the room of statues being restored. There were probably over a hundred in there. They mostly just needed touch ups but it was cool to see. In all, we spent about 45 minutes in the museum. I would say it’s not worth it in general, but we had gone to Florence to see David and David probably was worth it.
After David we headed south to the Sante Croce church which I’d also heard was worth seeing. Like all the churches in Florence it’s in the Byzantine style just like the Marie Maggiore in Rome. It was 5 Euro to get in though and half of it was under construction so we opted to just look at the outside. Then we headed to the Ponte Vecchio (Vecchio Bridge) which is the famous bridge with the jewelry stores up and down. Traci had brought money specifically to buy a piece there so Kristina and I hung out while she picked out a piece she liked. There are at least a dozen shops all next to each other and we figured they were all competing, making haggling worth it. As Traci found out when they took her inside, however, they all actually work together and share pieces. Who would have guessed?
Afterwards we went up to the Orsanmichele church and went in that for free, and then up to the Santa Maria Novelle church which we had passed coming from the train station the first day. That one was 2.50 but very worth it. It was gorgeous. It had black and white stripes on the ceiling (the zebra church, I called it) and frescos on the walls from the 1200’s. Some of them were pretty faded but you could still make out the pictures and the stories. There was pretty impressive ceiling work as well and of course, I love the mosaic floors of the churches.
We left that church just as it was closing and walked north to get a glimpse of the old fortress before deciding we wanted dinner. We decided to do a sit down pasta meal for the first time in Italy and weaved through the streets until we found a deal with liked. Traci went with spinach ricotta cannelloni, I went with spaghetti carbonara and Kristina ordered the special of a half salad and a half pizza. We left very satisfied, grabbed a final scoop of gelato on our way back to the hostel and then prepared for bed early. This meant we went to bed at 11. This was fun because we woke up at 2:30, pretty much mirroring our Day One. After checking out of the hostel, we walked through the quiet streets back to the train station to catch our bus to the Pisa airport. Pisa and Florence are an hour apart by bus, we figured out. We checked in at the airport, bought breakfast, cleared security, boarded the plane and instantly fell asleep. I woke up just as we were about to land. It was a Ryan Air flight so I nudged Traci and told her we were going to bounce. She gripped the seat tightly as we landed…. And bounced up again before actually landing. We’re wondering now if this has to do with how light the plane is due to the baggage restrictions… must ask a pilot. Anyway, it was actually kinda fun to bounce if you are expecting it. And of course we landed safely. From this point it was a repeat of returning from Barcelona. We stepped off the plane and instead of the 90 degrees and sun of Italy… it was 60 degrees and raining. Thanks, Munich. Glad to see you again, too… From the airport we took a bus to a train and then headed back to Munich. Kristina left us halfway to go straight to Augsburg where she is staying with her grandmother for the next few days. Traci and I headed straight to our hotel (which had the room ready early! Yay!) and took a nap. At 1:00 we went back to Olympiazentrum and I picked up my stuff from Jaakko and thanked him. Then I left Traci at the hotel and went to finish my business in Munich. This meant picking up my last two Scheins and figuring out bank account stuff. Everything was figured out. I got straight A’s this semester by the way the grades transfer. Yay! Transportation ended up as a 2.3 and German Lit was a 1.3! I turned my papers into Dr. Conrad who will mail the transcript back to U of IL, and then I met Traci and we headed out to dinner at a German place before turning in very early. We were exhausted. And I was also sick. I woke up at 2 am that morning with no voice… by the end of the night I had a cough, runny nose and sore throat. Ew.


Thursday we woke up after a full 9 hours of sleep. I was feeling slightly better so we headed to the train station for an excursion to Schloss Linderhof. This is the last of the 3 palaces that Ludwig II built and the only one he completed. It was kinda rainy but the tour was inside, luckily. It is indeed a very small palace. There are less than a dozen rooms, but they are all pretty amazing… covered in gold with 3-D embroidery and chandeliers out of porcelain and ivory and crystal. After the palace we walked around the gardens and headed up to his man-made cave. The man made cave that he put a painting in and hung porcelain roses in. Apparently he watched privately preformed operas inside. It could be heated to room temperature for him. He was a little bit off… also notable is that the palace was dedicated to the French kings (just like one of his other two palaces, Herrencheimsee which is a copy of Versailles… he was a little obsessed with the French) and the cave was based on a scene in one of Richard Wagner’s opera (Neuschwanstein, the third of his palaces was dedicated to Wagner… who was also apparently also a bit obsessed with).
Anyway, now we’re back in Munich at the hotel and it is Tuesday night as I am writing this. Shortly we will go to dinner (I’ve been stocking up on as much German food as I can so I won’t miss it as much when I get back). Tomorrow is my last day in Munich. I’ve been here over 300 days and now I have one left. It’s supposed to be nice so we will head to the Botanical gardens in the morning. They are in the gardens of Schloss Nymphenburg but it was winter when I got here so I have not yet seen them. Then I’ll show Traci around Munich and see everything for one last time myself. After that it’s time for the airport.
Do stay tuned though, as I have one more post planned to end this blog. This is, however, probably the last post from Germany.

Pictures:
Duomo
David
City Hall

Pisa... The Italy Adventure Begins

Saturday night was Sommernachtstraum (Summer Night’s Dream) in Olympia Park. After packing and cleaning all day, Matt, Kristina, Amy and I met in Olympia Park with blankets and settled down to wait. It was basically a huge festival with tons of food (German food…) and live music and some carnival games for the kids. When it got dark around 10 it was time for the fireworks. The show was amazing. It was synced to music with an additional fire show and laser light show. The fireworks were set off both behind us on Olympia Hill and directly in front of us over the lake. There were 4 tons of fireworks and a 45 minute show. It was awesome.

The next morning was my trip to Austria. I went to the lake with Lisa that afternoon. I spent Monday morning with Andrea in the shop and in the afternoon I walked around Hall. Monday night I went back to Munich.

Tuesday morning Traci arrived. I picked her up at the airport in the morning and she got to help me clean after that. Kristina had borrowed a vacuum from her aunt who lives in Munich so after we both vacuumed we took it back to her aunt’s along with her stuff since she was leaving it with her for the week of Italy. Then we met up with Matt on Marienplatz and walked around for a while before all heading to Hofbrauhaus to meet Erika and Tim for our going away dinner in tourist central. The food was good though and very German of course. Erika and Tim had to go back to study for more exams, so Kristina, Matt and I headed to an outdoor café to get dessert. The night ended with saying goodbye to Matt and me dropping my stuff off in Jaakko, my Finnish friend’s room. He lives in Olympizentrum but was going to be gone the same time we were so he had given me a key to leave my stuff in his room. We set our alarms for 3 am and went to bed at 11 pm.

The next “morning” if you can call it that, Kristina, Traci and I grabbed the backpacks we would be living out of for the next week and left our rooms in Olympiazentrum for the last time. We dropped off our keys in a mailbox and noted the people who were hanging out outside who hadn’t gone to bed yet… we boarded the first subway of the morning at 4:17 to the main station and then our 4:40 am train to Memmingen. That’s when I opened my bag to grab our boarding passes since I had printed them all out… and they weren’t there. They had been there last night because we had had to call the hostel in Rome to reconfirm our booking 24 hours in advance. I was well aware they were not in the room as I had double checked every cabinet and drawer before leaving. I had no idea where they were but they were not there. The thing about RyanAir is, that though it’s an insanely cheap airline (20 Euro round trip to Pisa from Munich), they can afford to do this because they charge you for absolutely everything. If you forget your boarding pass, for example, it’s 40 Euro to reprint. It was 5 am and we were in the middle of Bavaria where nothing opens before 9 am. It didn’t look good. We had to switch trains in Buchloe. As we’d only had 3 minutes to switch and we were running 5 minutes late we were already worried about that. Then we jumped off the train and realized that our connection was running 30 minutes late. There went any hope of finding an internet café in Memmingen before we got to the airport. We wouldn’t have time. Buchloe looked pretty empty. At Kristina’s insistence though, we dashed over to the main office. There was no one there. I spotted a German smoking outside the entrance and decided to ask him. Sure enough he was from Buchloe. He directed us to a casino a block away. A casino with internet access and a printer. Wow. We rushed over, nearly tripped over the cleaning lady and launched at the computers. I reprinted out our boarding passes and hostel information and we raced back to the train station… with ten minutes to spare. Crisis averted. We boarded the train to Memmingen feeling much more relieved and much more awake. Once at the airport things went smoothly. We made it through security, boarded the plane and instantly fell asleep. We woke up as we were circling Pisa. The plane landed 30 minutes early somehow (it was a 1:40 minute flight). We bought a bus ticket to the city center and quickly realized we were more out of our element than we had ever been in any other country in Europe. No one spoke English. Everyone, on the other hand, spoke Italian and they all expected us too as well. Kristina found this out when a man on the bus started loudly talking to her in Italian and when she responded with a blank stare and “I don’t know what you’re saying”, he continued to speak loudly in Italian at her. Helpful. We somehow managed to find the right stop and wandered in the right direction until we finally came upon the Field of Miracles, the location of the Leaning Tower. If you aren’t aware, the Leaning Tower is not the only tourist attraction of Rome. The Field of Miracles is a set of four buildings, all equally white. There’s the baptistery, the church and the mausoleum and then the bell tower, which leans. The first three represent the three stages of life: birth, God and death. As it is 15 Euro to walk up to the top of the tower we settled with photos and then wandered up the strip of souvenir stands set up along the field before stopping at one of the food stands for a Panini. Yummy. Italian food is tasty. Pisa took us about 2 hours so we found our way back to the train station and bought our 17 Euro tickets to Rome. The train ride that followed was not the most pleasant experience of the trip. I forgot to mention the thing we noted when we stepped off the plane in Pisa. It was hot. Like really hot. Especially compared to the Munich summer Kristina and I had been experiencing. There 85 is pretty hot. Pisa was well in the nineties and very sunny. This wasn’t a huge problem walking around as compared to St. Louis it was very not humid which makes all the difference and the shade was quite bearable… but then we realized that the train was not air-conditioned. The train was very crowded. The train was a 4 hour’s ride. The train was fairly miserable. We were dying and we were out of water.

When the train finally got to Rome, we scrambled off and then spent the next hour lost and wandering around the main train station because we were lost and couldn’t find our hostel. And because nobody could speak English and help us even though we were in Rome, which we had assumed would be tourist central. After two people shook their heads and spoke Italian at us and one newspaper stand man sent us in what we later found out was the exact opposite direction, we finally found a woman who, though she spoke no English either, directed us the right way through use of sign language. Straight ahead. There will be an arch. Go under it. Straight ahead.

And then we found the hostel. Almost anyway. We got to the proper street number and realized there was no hostel. Luckily we got there right when other people staying there did and they led us up. See it was in an apartment type building and just had a few of the rooms… very confusing and kinda awkward to navigate. We went up to the 2^nd floor to check in and were led to the 1^st floor to get to our room. Exhausted, we dropped our stuff on our beds and came to the very disappointing realization that our hostel had no air-conditioning as well. See, when Kristina and I booked the hostels back in June we had seen certain hostels advertising their AC. But, living in Munich’s autumn like summer we had laughed and thought that was a stupid thing to advertise. Now we realized that we were the stupid ones.

The hostel was offering a free dinner that night, completely randomly, so we stuck around for the pasta and wine, a true Italian meal. Afterwards we wandered outside around our hostel for a bit and happened across gelato (as it is very hard not to). The ice cream is pretty much the same as in Munich, but where Munich gives you one tiny scoop for 80 cents (which I thought was cheap…), Rome gave us three huge slabs for 2 euro. Very happy we headed back to the hostel and collapsed in our beds. And with that I’ll end the Pisa post.

ROME!!!

Exhausted as we’d been we’d gone to bed at 10 pm. We woke up at 6:30, packed our bags for a day of travel, and headed towards the subway to start exploring Rome. We happened upon a bakery across the street from the hostel and decided to buy breakfast. That was an experience. At least she spoke a little English. She also was apparently very amused by us. She picked up a croissant and started repeating “Energy! Energy! Energy!” which we took to mean, “you should eat this, it will give you energy for the day”. Traci agreed to take it so she would stop forcing it at us. The lady then decided to teach us Italian and started repeating every English word we said with the Italian word. We nodded in confusion and hurried out.

We took a subway from our hostel to the Vatican, our first stop of the morning. It was 8:10 when we got there. It was supposed to open at 9 according to the website and 8:30 according to the guide. We got in line and sat down to eat our breakfast and wait. And then the line started moving. We were going inside. Kristina and I frantically started “dressing” ourselves. Prepared for the heat we were wearing tank tops and shorts but shoulders and knees must be covered in all churches in Italy. So as I pulled a jacket on and lengthened my adjustable shorts to Capri length, Kristina pulled jeans and a shirt over her outfit and we all shoved our pastries into our mouths just in time to be herded through security. We were inside, had bought out tickets, and had entered the museum by 8:20, way before the museum was supposed to be early. We were very confused. As a result though, we wandered through the museums with almost no one else there. Instead of the rumors we had heard of being packed like sardines and shoved through the hallways, we were wandering at our own pace. This worked to our disadvantage when we got to the Sistine Chapel, though… it’s hard to sneak pictures where there are five security guards and only 15 other people. We continued through the museum from there and the Italian men myth was proved true when Traci stopped a security guard to ask a question about the artwork on the ceiling. Our Italian friend had warned us to watch out for the guys because one of his highschool past times was hanging out in tourist spots with his friends and trying to pick up tourists. Standing in the Vatican museums after the guard explained to us that the paintings on the ceiling were really just paintings and meant to look 3-D but weren’t, the security guard tried to ask her out. We figured it was time to leave. In order get to the Basilica of St. Peter we had been told to take the exit out of the Sistine Chapel so we headed back that way. By this time it was 10 am and it actually was getting crowded. Sure enough, the Sistine Chapel was overflowing with people. This made pictures of the ceiling slightly easier. We headed out the exit and found ourselves herded into the crypts/tombs of the popes instead of the Basilica. When we made it out of there it was as if we had exited the Basilica. That meant we had to get in line to get in. There was quite a line. Luckily, though, it moved very fast. It was quite amazing, and obviously huge. We managed to get in and out within a half hour and were finished with Vatican City by noon. We stopped for pizza and gelato for lunch and headed towards Rome’s castle.

There were two big but pleasant surprises in Rome. The first was how walkable it was. Originally looking at the map we were a little concerned, but (though we probably walked a good 6+ miles both days) we made it between main destinations within 15 minutes and only took the subway three times in the entire trip. Secondly, the water fountains were amazing. Coming from Germany which does not know what a water fountain is (something I have also seen in every other country I have visited), Rome was unique and amazing. There are little fountains mounted on walls of just along the streets every few blocks in Rome and they have drinkable water pouring out. We all filled our water bottles up every time we passed one. We must have each had at least 6 liters of water a day and yet we still didn’t make bathroom breaks. It was hot.

But back to our day. We walked around the castle (which looks very different from all the German castles we keep seeing) and then wandered around some Piazza’s and happened upon the Spanish steps without realizing it. We were at the top of something circled on the map. These look like steps, we thought. I wonder if these are the Spanish steps. We walked down them. They didn’t seem that impressive so I was guessing not. They also were not very crowded. When we got to the bottom and looked up, though, we realized they had to be. From the steps we headed to the Pantheon, which was awesome to see just because it was the first old thing we had actually seen in Rome… the Colloseum was on the list for Friday. That’s where we decided to do a pub crawl that night. Thursday was lady’s night apparently and the prospect of a 5 Euro discount, free pizza and a t-shirt seemed like fun. We headed over to a couple more Piazzas and something that looked like ruins on the map to end our afternoon. The ruins turned out to be the outdoor cat sanctuary. It’s in a random square of ruins and there are stray cats everywhere. Basking on chunks of old columns, curled up on chunks of old rock… it was awesome. They are taken care of by a group of volunteers (they have all their shots) and are adoptable and seem to absolutely love it there. But that makes sense. It’s a giant playground with a million places to sleep and a lot of sun. Our last stop of the night was the Trevi fountain, which, as promised, was packed full of people. We rested our feet sitting there for a bit and then took the metro two stops back to the hostel because we were so tired. We rested for a couple of hours and showered off all the sunscreen and sweat (I didn’t get sunburned the entire trip!!! Even though I spent 12 hours a day in the hot sun! I’m so proud of myself! I even have a little tan!) before heading to the pub crawl. I think the highlight was that it met right outside of the Colloseum. That meant we got to see it all lit up at night. We met some pretty fun people, including the workers. They had apparently had a girl from St. Louis working from them and greeted us with “Rams, Cardinals, Blues, Arch…” We got to see a lot of Rome by night just walking around. Also cool was that the next day we randomly walked by one of the guides from the night before and he recognized us and said, “hey St. Louis!” But anyway, we took a bus (for free!) back to the train station and headed to our hostel to sleep. We slept in a little later the next morning and got the free breakfast at the hostel before starting day two in Rome.

The day started with the Colloseum and the Forum. We had been warned to skip the queue by buying a joint ticket at the Forum. I even managed to haggle a half-price ticket because EU citizens get in half price and I had an EU student ID… he wanted a passport but apparently didn’t want to argue because he agreed to give it to me. We tried searching for free tours but no one was advertising so we just followed a couple of different tour groups for a while trying to hear what they were saying and then finished up on our own. The Forum was really cool. It’s pretty much a huge area of ruins including the palace and a lot of the original city. There’s a lot of history there. After two hours in the Forum we got to skip the line at the Colloseum thanks to our tickets. That was also very cool. We bought pizza for lunch and decided we needed a break so we headed out of the hustle and bustle a bit to a quiet street, bought gelato and chilled for about an hour, resting our feet. Then we headed over to find Michelangelo’s Moses in the St. Peter in Chains church. This proved to be the biggest adventure of the day. We couldn’t find it. I swore the map was messed up. First we wandered into the University accidently. The classrooms we walked by and the University sign on the door later gave that away. Directly across from the University there was a cross on the church along with a plaque for “St. Peter in Chain’s Square”. We figured that was the church. We couldn’t figure out how to get in. It was walled in. We walked around the entire building, leading us down a hill and around a parking lot. There was no entrance. After thirty minutes we gave up and decided to find the metro station so we could head south and see the Pyramid and the baths. Easier said than done. We wandered for another 30 minutes because the street directions didn’t make sense. Finally we sat down on the steps of a building next to the church we couldn’t get into to read the map. Then I turned around. Where were we? Sitting on the steps of the Church of St. Peter in Chains. Which was also on the Church of St. Peter in Chains square. It was next to the University, not across from it. Feeling very stupid we went in to look at Moses. Knowing where the church really was made it easier to read the map and we found the metro shortly after.

The metro came up right by the pyramid. Obviously it doesn’t look quite like the ones in Egypt but it was still pretty cool. From there we wandered in the direction of the Baths (according to the map). Unfortunately this was too far south to be on our hostel provided maps (which had otherwise been extremely helpful). So we wandered and hoped we would find it. After 15 minutes of walking in the same direction, I was getting worried… everything else in Rome was 15 minutes apart. We stopped a man with a dog and tried to ask if he knew where it was. He shook his head and spoke Italian. We tried to act out “baths”. Didn’t work. We walked on. We saw an Italian military guy with a loaded machine gun hanging out on a street corner. There was a tank behind him. We decided to ask him. He also spoke practically no English. He tried to direct us towards a bathroom. Luckily at that moment a college aged guy walked across the street towards us and asked if we needed help. He spoke very good English and directed us. We were going the right way, it was just another ten minutes down the road.

The baths were also pretty cool. They were massive anyway. Apparently there were three floors to them. Obviously it’s all ruins now but you can see the outlines of the rooms, some of the mosaics from the walls and some of the mosaic floors still intact. By the time we finished in there we were pretty hungry and decided we wanted to try the Italian döners. We walked back to the main city and finally found a döner place (they are only around until you actually want to find one…). Sorely disappointed. The German ones (and the French and even the very different Spanish ones) are much better. Something was off about the meat and the sauce and the bread and they microwaved the lettuce and tomato.

We had a couple more sites to see and it was still light out so we started towards the giant palace type thing on the map. It turns out this was actually where the president lives. We found this out when we tried to walk into it and the security guard looked at us like we were nuts and shooed us away. Oops! We also happened upon the cat sanctuary again, so we got distracted watching the cats for a bit. The final stop, though, was the Trajan forum. That was also pretty cool. I think we were used to seeing random old columns and gates and pieces of building around the city by that point, but it was still pretty neat. The Marc Auerlous column was very impressive and we used some of the knowledge we’d picked up from the Forum tour guides to notice the columns… you could see the original brick beneath the layer of marble that they had later been covered with. We hung out in the area for a bit enjoying the last night in Rome and then headed back to the hostel for bed.

The next morning we checked out and started towards the train station. We had 2 hours before our train which was perfect to check out the Mary Maggiore church, the second to last thing I had wanted to see. It was extremely different than any other church I have seen anywhere else in Europe. This is the Byzantine style, apparently, but it’s very colorful and painted in comparison to the bronze and gold of the baroque style or the huge vaulted ceilings and massive columns of the gothic style. We spent the extra time hanging out at Republique Square and then bought paninis and hopped on the train. We were prepared for a 3.5 hour hot and sweaty train ride… and then we got lucky and happened upon the one air-conditioned train car as we looked for seats. Yay! That made the ride much more enjoyable. And with that, because this post is long enough, I’ll end the Rome post and continue with Florence on the next one.

Pictures:

The inside of a church

The Colosseum

The Forum

Cats in the ruins

Trevi Fountain

Pantheon

Sistine Chapel