Rome: Part IV

This is the final installment in the Rome saga. I'm sorry it took so long to get it up, but it took me a long time to write. You will see as you read on. Enjoy!

First of all, I must preface this blog post with a portion of an email I received yesterday:

...

Dear jj, Julie, and Katie,

Congratulations on winning OfficeTally's 'Hope Grows in a Dump' Haiku Contest! http://www.officetally.com/hope-grows-in-a-dump-haiku-contest

Please email me your full name and shipping address, and I will get The Office 2010 Calendar out to you.

:) Jennie

...


Hooray!!!!!!! Due in a huge part to your dedicated voting, I am one of three winners of a 2010 Office calendar! If there was a way I could split the calendar up into pieces, one for every vote that you so loyally cast, I totally would. Then I could share with you the sweetness of haiku victory. Sadly, this cannot be the case because the calendar is currently on its way to my home in Seattle, and I will not be united with it until June when half the calendar will have lost its usefulness. But, I can still say now that I won an Office haiku contest, and THE reason is you, readers! So thank you, thank you, thank you!

To honor the other winners of the contest, I thought you might be interested in reading the two haikus that also won their authors a 2010 calendar (might they also have blog audiences they can rally? Who knows?). These two are also fine pieces of work:

jj:
A first kiss followed,
By a Ra-di-di-di-do,
Hope grows in a dump.

Julie:
With trash collecting
Two were sweetly connecting
Hope grows in a dump

Three cheers for haikus!

Now on to the final installment in the Rome saga.

Rome: Part IV

or, How "Can we stay longer?" turned into "Can we get out of here?"

Although the switching on of European daylight saving time meant that we went to bed at 2AM, Anna and I were convinced that the walk to the train station to go to the airport was not going to be our only image of Rome on our last day. So, at 6AM we were up and walking the quiet streets of Rome that lead to the Colosseum.

And we watched the sun come up over a monument that we had completely to ourselves.

























































Favorite moment: standing outside the gates and looking in to the completely empty arena. When the place normally looks like this during the day,



















seeing it empty was pretty cool.

We also got to see a few other places in the early-morning light on our was down:







































And that, I think, was a fitting goodbye to Rome.

Oh, and Anna and I got whistled at several times on the walk back. Once by the garbage man, too! I mean, come on! The garbage man? I guess that's what we get for being the only people walking down the street...

Anyway, now it was time to HEAD TO THE AIRPORT

This is where the...fun began.

We made it to the train station on time. We also bought tickets smoothly, found our train with no problems, and took the good ol' Leonardo Express to Fiumicino airport without a hitch.

Then we got off the train.

First, let me preface this story with another story. Last year three friends and I got tear-gassed in Paris. You have maybe heard this story before, since I tend to tell it quite often. But the thing with that story is, we didn't do anything wrong. We were in a Metro station that just happened to be right next to an ongoing riot, and when the tear gas from the riot drifted down into the tunnels of the Metro, we linked arms and ran out. Then we got away. Pretty good story, but because we did exactly the right thing in that situation.

Now, back to the train station at the airport, and our run-in with the Italian police. Excuse me -- the railway police. They were very proud of that fact.

And this story, my friends, is in some ways much the same as my tear gas story, and in some ways very different. You shall see.

So Nick, Adam, and I were walking up the platform. Matteo, Eric, and Anna were a ways ahead. I have just started thinking about the Coca Cola I'm going to buy once I get past security, when we are stopped by the railway police.

Time for some more handy tips, now, folks:

Handy tip #1

Do not trust Wikitravel as your main source of scam information, because Wikitravel does not sometimes pay attention to cultural nuances. IMPORTANT cultural nuances.

Handy tip #2

When the railway police ask for your passport, take a moment to examine their uniforms, name tags, and --excuse me -- GUNS before suspecting (accusing?) them of not being real police

Yeah. This is a fun story, right? I am trying to do it justice.

So they ask the three of us for our passports. Adam tells them that his passport is in his brother's bag (who is now WAAAAAY ahead of us. Great), and he runs ahead.

Nick and I are left behind and begin getting our passports out.

It is at THIS moment that I remember something I read on Wikitravel, that sometimes in Italy people will come up to you, posing as police, then ask for your passport and run away. Wikitravel advised me to ask the police if I could see their badge, or something. Scam police would be scared away by this, and real police would be happy to verify their authenticity and move on with the check.

Actually, I'm not sure if Wikitravel used the phrase "be happy." This might be something that I, the American who was taught that the police are heroes, my friends, the good guys, etc., read into this...

Cultural differences, guys...

So, Nick gives them his passport (smart guy), and I say "can I see your badge?"

*facepalm*

Really, I think I should drop out of college right now. Did I even refer to my own Handy tip #2, a.k.a. noticing their possession of GUNS? What scam police have guns? What stupid person tries to argue with someone who has a gun?

But this is making for a good story, right?

This is also when I will refer back to Handy tip #1, which is the cultural differences between police in the world. The railway police were VERY OFFENDED that I did not think they were police officers. They did a lot of pointing at their office sign, pointing at their badges, yelling about stupid Americans, etc., etc. It was a cool time.

Oh, yeah. Their office. After I refused to give them my passport, they decided that Nick and I needed to go into their office. It was a very tiny little office, with all the blinds drawn to hide us from the outside world.

And I actually thought, "Great. Is Prof. Aay going to have to come extradite us from this little office?"

It was about at this time that I decided they were real police and not scam artists (way to go, Katie). I also realized that only one of the three police officers was insanely angry (yelling the stupid American insults, etc.). The other two were calm and ended up being helpful. They convinced the upset officer not to search our backpacks like he wanted (thank goodness), and one explained to me that they were only using our passports to check our criminal record in the EU, so the fact that our student Visas for study in the Netherlands hadn't come through yet wasn't a huge deal (thank goodness some more).

Angry police officer was still very confused as to why I hadn't thought they were real police officers. I mumbled something about "the internet" and said the phrase "I apologize" about thirty times. He went off on something about how Italy was not some small country in Africa, etc.

Around this time (I think. It all blends together) we realized that Adam, Matteo, Anna, and Eric HAD indeed come back for us. Which was very, very good news, since having them run away would have made us look even more suspicious than my somewhat-misplaced resistance had. They entered their four passports into the computer, too, and let us go.

And we got out of there, with many many lessons learned. Like, refusing to give up your passport, while a good protective instinct to have, can make you look suspicious. And, respect the pride of the Italian police. And their guns.

Lessons aside, I must admit that we also had a few questions. Like, is stopping random tourists really the best use of the railway police's time? Just saying.

We made our way through a maze of broken escalators and long tunnels to the check-in desk. By this point, we were a bit behind schedule as far as checking in to our flight goes. EasyJet has a strict policy that no one can check in after 40 minutes before the flight, and we got to the counter with 10 minutes before that point. The line was long, and only one person was working behind the desk.

Just another example of the brilliance of Italian bureaucracy.

But we got checked in, only to walk across the room and get into a long security line. Actually, there were two lines, but they both fed into the same security scanner, so there really was only one line. Plus, the line was not moving very fast because they had a grand total of four bins for everyone to use to send their stuff through the scanners.

...

The good news after security was that our gate was not far away, and we were five minutes away from boarding. The weird news was that we could not see a plane at the gate, and our flight was not boarding. The board said nothing about a delay, but we weren't going anywhere.

Half an hour later, we started boarding...slowly. Every single person had to put their carry-on baggage into that little sizing bin before going through the gate (didn't we already do that at check-in?). Inch by inch, we made our way through the gate to board, then down the jetway to... a bus.

No wonder we hadn't seen our plane.

Half of the people in the boarding area were now crowded into the bus, and we drove off across the tarmac to find our plane. We found it and stopped.

Anna goes, "I bet they don't let us off the bus yet."

If we had actually been betting, Anna would be richer now. For, indeed, they did NOT let us off the bus right away. I half-laughed, half-grimaced. This was, what, instance 6 of the inefficiency of the Italian airport system? Our jokes while we waited about having to ride the bus all the way back to Amsterdam were only really half-jokes.

Finally, a man in a neon vest came off the plane and went over to his car. He rummaged around for a while and finally emerged with...

...his sunglasses. Then he went to work setting up the ropes and such that would keep us from wandering into the plane's engines, and after that let us off the bus.

We were then part of another easyJet RUSH TO THE PLANE moment as a bus full of people went to claim the best seats. Finally, we were on the plane, all in one piece. We could sit back, relax, and...wait for the second bus of passengers to show up.

I can only say that I spent nearly the entire flight sleeping, and it was well worth it. And when we got off the plane at Schipol, we were greeted with a clean, modern airport where all the moving walkways were working and, thanks to a tulip stand, the air smelled like flowers.

I had an amazing time in Rome. Those three days were days I will never forget.

But after those last few hours in the Italian airport, I can also say that it felt nothing short of wonderful to be back in this flat, gray, cold, crazy, friendly, beautiful country. I love the Netherlands!

Rome: Part III

They're all here, guys, the pictures are all here. They were never really gone... Anyone notice the date on yesterday's post? ;)

For real, now:

Rome: Part III

or, how my motto became I Can Always Sleep Later

Alright, here we go with everything you ever wanted to know about my next day in Rome. I promise you I will try make it fun. I will even include a few handy tips in case you soon find yourself at the Pope's front door. You see, this day was centered around going to Vatican City, and -- let's face it -- going to Vatican city left me with a lot of handy tips.

Handy tip #1:

GO EARLY

We knew the Vatican was a long walk from our hostel, so we budgeted an hour to get there. (Only later did we look it up online and see that the distance was THREE MILES. Sheesh). Eric, Ed, Anna, and I were physically walking out the door of our hostel at 7:05 am.

Round of applause, please. I never get moving this early.

Leaving at such an ungodly hour was worth it, worth it, worth it. We got to the Vatican shortly after 8:00 and had NO LINE to get in. Walking out of the basilica a mere two hours later, we saw that the line now stretched HALFWAY AROUND THE SQUARE and by some accounts was TWO HOURS LONG. The moral of the story is that, for St. Peter's, even 10:00am is not early enough. Get there sooner. Get there at 7:00 when it opens if you want to. It will be worth it.

I realize that I have been using a lot of CAPS WRITING even this short way into the post, and I apologize. The Vatican deserves better. Now I will just let you gaze upon some pictures of the square and the basilica (which we entered after waiting in no line, have I mentioned that?)




































See? At 8:00 in the morning, you get this place nearly to yourself.









































































Amazing. St. Peter's, all of it and everything around it, was my favorite "big moment" of going to Rome. It's on a physical and symbolic scale of such enormity, not much else compares.

Now on to...

Handy tip #2

Climb the Cupola!

Although the trip up was 551 winding, sloping, narrowing stairs, it was worth every drop of sweat and every eurocent. We climbed first to an inside view of the basilica:




































(Just can't get away from that grate keeping us in.)

Then it was up, up, up to the best view at the very top!



























































(Notice, in the last picture, how far the line has stretched! Handy tip #1, I'm telling you!)

After climbing halfway back down, there is (surprise, surprise) a gift shop and the chance to check out where you just were. We were up above the blueish part, just below the vertical column piece...things:

























After our ascent up to the cupola, we descended down into the grottoes where the popes of ages past are buried. Mostly the area was quiet (we kept getting told over the intercom system to be silent and respectful) and everyone walked past a majority of graves without stopping, mainly for me since I didn't know who they were or what they did. Except for John Paul II. Everyone was waiting to walk past his tomb, and some were even allowed into a roped-off area where they could pray for an extended period of time. For many people, it was an extremely emotional event (tears, etc.).

And I was struck by a thought: As much as visiting St. Peter's was a dream of mine, and as inspired and awe-struck as I was by it, the experience will never come close to meaning for me what it means for millions of others. This place was more than just a tourist spot. A lot more.

Whew, with that off my chest, let's get out of the grottoes and get some fresh air. Time to head out of St. Peter's square and over to the Vatican Museum, everyone! And also time for:

Handy tip #3

If you have enough time in Rome, do St. Peter's and the Vatican Museum on different days. Both were a lot of walking in their own right, and combined the two made for about five hours of non-stop foot-use. Also, we used our get-in-early card on St. Peter's, and by the time we arrived at the museum there was a line waiting for us. With a week or so, it would be wise to take things at a slower pace, maybe enjoy them more.

But I didn't have a week. And I regret nothing. Bring on the endless museum!

I say endless because the Vatican Museum has learned a thing or two from Disney World. Everyone, at least %99.99 of visitors, come to the Vatican Museum to see the Sistine Chapel. It's a fact that I don't even have to look up. Yet the Vatican Museum has hundreds, thousands of other artifacts for people to see that will get ignored as tourists fly by on their way to the Michelangelo wonder-room.

The Vatican Museum has a solution, though, and that is to make every visitor walk through every single room of the museum to get to la Cappella Sistina. This even includes an outdoor walkway for part of the journey to keep you from short-cutting your way around five rooms. I will not bore you with thousands of pictures, but instead I will say that nearly every room was a version of this:



















and every single room was amazing and worthy of more attention than I gave them.

But walking through all the rooms was worth it, because we eventually made it to this:





















No, I didn't take this picture. I didn't even try join the I-took-an-illegal-picture-of-the-Sistine-Chapel club. I was too busy looking up, up, and up. While some places tend to disappoint in real life compared to the hyped-up version you hear about, this was not one of them. At least not for me. Amazing.

So there you have Vatican City, along with a few handy tips that I hope might someday come in handy to SOMEONE. But maybe these posts will convince you all to hope on a plane to Rome in the near future :)

At this point, Anna and I split of to do our own girl thing. Mainly, shopping. But we also fit a couple other things in there, too. One was to officially try Italian coffee (it had to be good, right? I mean, where did the words espresso, cappuccino, and latte come from?):



















Our waiter took the picture. He was special. When he gave Anna her caffe latte, he said "This is for my heart." I thought, great, what does that make me? Then he told me, "And this is for my other heart." Classy, waiter man, classy.

We also made our way to the Trevi fountain:



















We had to pull the classic move and throw a coin into the fountain. Now we're guaranteed to return to Rome! ;)

Action shot!
























Next it was time for probably my favorite "small moment" of the trip, called small only because it did not center around a world-famous landmark. Anna and I bought a cheap bottle of wine (and a cheap corkscrew from a tourist shop) and went back to the Spanish Steps:

























We found a spot in the sun



















And enjoyed this view for almost two hours!



















It was a great people-watching spot!

After a long, relaxing sit on the Spanish steps, we randomly ran into Nick, Adam, and Matteo on a random street near the river. We soon met up with Eric, and it was time for our (last!) nightly dinner experience. We didn't like the first restaurant we ended up at, so we switched locations to a place that worked out much better:






































(It was at THIS POINT in the trip that I realized I hadn't taken any pictures of Nick, Adam, and Matteo. So here they are! They really were there for the whole thing, I promise!)

The night needed to end with one last trip to Giolitti -- it was a requirement.



















I finally gave in and tried the Bailey's Irish Cream flavor, and it was a worthwhile decision. By this point, it was time to head back to the hostel and call it a night since we'd already lost an hour due to daylight saving time starting the next day. Our adventures in Italy were over...


...or were they?

Rome: Part II

Part II was going to be up yesterday, but then I found out that I had to do 192 pages of reading for biology class by this morning. It doesn't take much to figure out why this post has now been put off until today...

Rome: Part II

or, How I began a painful but worthwhile pattern of exploiting my feet

The first order of business on Friday was to walk to the Colosseum. Eric, Anna, Ed (who flew in on a different airline but we found Friday morning), and I set off in the morning with only a minor detour at a grocery store for sustenance. Buying cheap food for breakfast/lunch + enjoying a nice meal for dinner = the way to go. We ate breakfast under, you know, just a random monument. No big deal.















































Then walking, walking, walking, until -- tada!




















We took some time for the classic I-am-happy-to-be-in-front-of-the-Colosseum photos:



















But also had a moment of silence for those gladiators who lost their lives:



















(Hehe, serious photos make me laugh every time. I can't resist taking them).

Then we waited in line for a while with a few of our closest friends from around the world.



















And finally made it inside!



















Now I am going to share with you what I thought was a pretty tricky way of maximizing our learning while minimizing boredom/financial costs. Instead of going on a guided tour, we opted for the audioguide route. And we rented only ONE audioguide. Anna or I would listen to a track of the audioguide and then pass along a summary of the main points to everyone else. That way we didn't all have to listen to the long-winded audioguide voice, yet we all reaped some knowledge. Score!

(Even though we still managed to mess it up somewhat, by listening to the wrong tracks at the wrong points in the Colosseum. Oops.)

Here's a view from the top level:



















After that it was time to head over to the Palatine Hill, right next to the Colosseum.



















Palatine Hill in ten words or less:

Ruins from 1000 BC onward, great views, cool trees

That was nine words, not bad!

Palatine Hill was a great area to explore, especially since the weather that day was perfect -- sunny but not too hot. And it was just as I described.

Ruins:




















Great views:



















Cool trees:



















Here's the group:



















After Palatine Hill, we made our way down to the Forum.



















We had no audioguides here, so it is very hard to come up with concrete facts to share with you, but I will say that the Forum reminded me of the Senate, and the Senate reminded me of Julius Caesar being assassinated, so we reenacted the fateful event.



















Do not hold me to any historical accuracy on that.

After the Forum, it was only a short walk to another imposing marble structure: what I refer to as "the monument." It is actually called the Monument to Vittorio Emanuele II, or the National Monument to Vittorio Emanuele II, or Altare della Patria, or "Il Vittoriano." All of these names are hard to keep track of, and we walked by the monument about a dozen times, using it as a reference point for where we were in the city, so I began calling it simply "the monument" to make things easier.





































We wandered all the way up to the top and found a museum on the inside. Very cool.

From then it was off to the Pantheon, a very, very old building. It was built in 126 AD as a pagan temple, but has survived for so long because it was converted into a Catholic church. Probably its most famous feature is the oculus, which is the hole found in the roof. (Didn't I just sound so smart right there!?! Thank you, Wikipedia, for backing me up).

The square in front of the Pantheon is not very big, so it is hard to get a picture of the entire thing at once. I tried.



















Aaaaaaaand inside:





































Check another one off the Angels & Demons list!

After the Pantheon, our goal was to head to a park across the river. We wandered through small streets like this:



















And happened first upon the Castel Sant'Angelo:



















So excited! Another thing I very much wanted to see!




















...

Let me pause and catch my breath for a moment -- this post is a zinger!

...


Ok, from there we walked down the river a while. No one else was really walking down by the river. We wondered why. Then we noticed the extreme amount of garbage on the steps leading to/from the river, and did not wonder anymore.

But walking along the Tiber river itself, stairs excluded, was quite pleasant!





































See, very much uncrowded!

But, remember, we went this direction in the first place to find the ever-illusive park. We will make it to the park!

Or will we?

Ed, Anna, and I started off in what we believed was the correct direction. Turns out that direction took us mostly just uphill. WAAAAAY uphill. After living in the Netherlands for two months, I had forgotten about hills. I remember them now!

At the top of the hill was (surprise, surprise) a monument/fountain of some sort:
























And, tada! The botanical gardens! We were just stuck on the wrong side of the fence. (The picture is deceptive because you can't see the fence, but it was there. And look how pretty!)



















We followed the path along the fence for a while, thinking "this path is here for a reason. It will lead us to the entrance into the park."

Well, the path WAS there for a reason. It lead to a grove of trees that several people were...calling home. We turned around.

But coming to the top of the hill was not such a bad idea after all, because we saw a monument or two:



















And we got some pretty spectacular views on either side of the hill:









































Time now to head down the hill to Santa Maria in Trastevere, the meeting point for our nightly dinner. We found Nick, Adam, Matteo, and Eric, and once again enjoyed our time under the heat lamps sipping wine, eating pizza, and trying to ignore the street vendors selling roses, laser pointers, and singing ducks with long necks (yep).


On the way back to the hostel, it was time for -- you guessed it! -- Giolitti for some gelato.



















Orange and lemon tonight, guys. You know you want some. I want some right now just thinking about it!

And that was Friday! It makes me very happy writing this and reliving it all, so thank you for sticking with me and reading everything (if you made it all the way down here). Only two more posts like this, I promise, and then we will get back to the Dutch stuff! :)