Rome (October 12-13)

Rome was probably my least favorite place, but that wasn't really Rome's fault. I woke up on my first morning there feeling achy and with a terrible sore throat, but I hauled myself out of bed and went to the Sistine Chapel anyway. On the advice of someone working at my hostel, I hadn't bothered to get skip-the-line tickets, and as I watched people who had stream past me, I thought I would soon come to regret this, but it only took me about forty minutes to get inside the Vatican, and another twenty to get inside the Chapel itself. For some reason, I'd expected it to be bigger, but it was very beautiful. I mean, we've all seen pictures (or Arrested Development reenactments) of the paintings in the Sistine Chapel, but I was impressed by how lifelike they seemed in person, how incredibly 3-D. They don't let you take pictures inside, but here are a couple shots of the ceiling of the hallway leading to the Chapel.

After about half an hour of staring up, I went out and wandered through the rest of the Vatican Museums (I like the ancient statues and all the stuff found at archaeological sites), and then somehow found myself back in the crush of people headed for the Sistine Chapel, and I didn't know how to escape. IT was about ten times more crowded than it had been an hour and a half ago, and so hot, and that's when I started to really feel sick. I finally made it out of the Vatican Museum, but I took a wrong turn and ended up back out on the street instead of still inside the Vatican. So I decided to do the thing where you walk all the way around it to say that you've walked around an entire country, you know. I made it around to St. Peter's Basilica, which was unfortunately closed for some reason, and then I got a little lost, because, you know, that's what I do, and also the handy wall to my left, which is what I'd been following) disappeared and I found myself in a hospital backlot. Still, I made it back to the Vatican Museum eventually, so I'm gonna count it on the circumnavigating-a-country front. After that, I went back to my hostel, did some much-needed laundry, found out I had a temperature over a hundred, and had an early night.

After being woken at six am by two boys in my room going to Mass (grumble grumble), I dragged myself out of bed to do a free walking tour, but I was a couple minutes late to the meeting place and couldn't find it, so I just did it by myself, more or less, and saw the Trevi Fountain (which is not the fountain from When in Rome, apparently), the Spanish Steps (they're just steps with one million tourists sitting on them), and the Pantheon (okay, pretty impressive, I'll give you this one, Rome). I had planned to go inside the Colosseum, but once I got there I decided that it wasn't worth it to stand in line and pay money for something I wasn't going to enjoy, since the only thing I would have enjoyed right then was a nap. So I took one on the grass in front of the Colosseum, then headed back to the Pantheon for the best pasta I had in Italy, bought a couple souvenirs and my last gelato, and rushed off to catch a train to Paris.