Day 1: Starting off our adventure: The Vatican

Sorry for the long time, no post thing. Christmas, recovering from the trip, and my birthday kept me busy. Anyway, I want to document my trip, but couldn't figure out how to select only a few pictures. So I'm going to break it up. I'll post each day of the trip as a separate entry. Hopefully I'll get through at least one of these a day.

Anyway, my mom and I started on our trip by getting a ride to the airport with my friend Stephen. But once we got to the airport, we found out there was about a five hour delay. Our aircraft had a hydraulic leak and they needed to fly out a new bird to us. Of course I was glad for the safety, but annoyed we had to wait so long.

Eventually, we got on the flight and after 10 hours (luckily mostly at night so I was in sleepy sleeply land) we arrived in Rome. We ended up paying the taxi service to get us to our stop. Our bed and breakfast was basically part of an apartment, so it was hard to find. It was a nice little place about three or four blocks from the Vatican.

Our first day found us checking out the Vatican. After walking past St. Peter's Square, we went to the Vatican Museums.


St. Peter's Square - where the Pope speaks

The Vatican Museums are a collection of museums, including an Egyptian museum, Etruscan museum, and most famously, the Sistine Chapel. The pictures I have here aren't enough to show you how awesome it is. There is so much art on the walls and the ceilings on the way to the Sistine Chapel, it's amazing. Check my Facebook or hopefully soon my flickr account to see all the pictures. These will be a select favorites.

Just an example of how beautiful the cuppolas and ceilings are.

My mom and me

After going through the Sistine Chapel and leaving the Vatican Museums, we went to St. Peter's Basilica. We started going to the Cuppola, not really realizing what was involved with going there. What it is is a trip up the big cuppola of St. Peter's. Basically, I walked to the top. Luckily Mom realized very quickly she couldn't make it up. I barely did. You walk up these steep narrow stairs, and for the first so many steps, there was no place to pull over and rest and let others pass you by, so you had to just keep walking. It was VERY tiring. It took me forever to walk up there.


I made it to the top. You can see how red my face is from walking up over 300 steep stairs.

St. Peter's Square from up on top of the Basilica. AWESOME views of Rome and the Vatican!

By the time I got down and then rested, it started getting dark, so we made our way inside the Basilica. We got to see so much great architecture and such beautiful decorations (damper later when I realized all the marble pretty much came from the area around the the Colosseum and is part of the reason why that place is so picked over). It is amazing.


Inside St. Peter's is The Pieta, by Michaelangelo, which shows Mary holding the body of her son, Jesus Christ. Just amazing.

After that, we went to find some authentic (but expensive) Italian food. It didn't taste that much different to me. That was kind of a disappointment. Then we went back to the bed and breakfast and rested up for our journey into the rest of Rome the next day.