Täglich Wiederkehrendes Abenteuer

Our second full day in Rome got off to a better start with us actually getting up, having showers, eating a little breakfast, and getting out into the city! The room from our view is also awesome. It’s not scenic, but it’s neat. We even have the traditional Roman window shutters.

Once you get those suckers open, you get this:

We decided to hit the Vatican up first, so we went down to St. Peter’s. Apparently this is tourist time, because we had to “run the gauntlet” of people trying to offer us amazing deals on museum tickets and city tours! It was annoying and fun all at once. We also keep seeing these things:

Do they need to drive those home every night, or can they just leave them? It’s these kinds of questions that keep us up at night.

Once we actually made it to St. Peter’s, we walked around the square a bit before heading inside the basilica. It’s pretty much how I remember it. I’ll let the pictures tell the story.

MJ was pretty entertained.

The Swiss Guard were… guarding.

I will mention though that I love Vatican security. We had to go through a bag Xray/metal detector combo to get in, but it was basically just a guy standing there waving everyone through. Almost everyone set off the detector, but he didn’t care. No complaints here either!

There was also some awesome lighting.

We also got to see St. Peter’s tomb.

There was also this crazy statue. Can you spot anything interesting?

That’s right, face of Jesus.

We walked around inside the basilica, then headed down into the grotto (underground passageways with papal tombs). I’m not sure what was up with the grotto, but we didn’t see them all, and I’m certain we didn’t even see as much as was open back in 2005 when I visited. So, stuff changes I guess.

After the grotto, we browsed the gift shop. I was very amused to see that the gift shop nuns were using a PlayStation 3 and an LCD monitor to play a DVD.

Then did the phone book tearing in St. Peter’s square. Plenty of commentary on that on my blog. We then had to head back through the gauntlet to get to the Vatican museum. The Vatican museum was busy, but we still managed to get inside without much hassle. That was nice. We walked through the art and sculptures areas and made our way to the Sistine Chapel.

The museum also afforded a good view of St. Peter’s Basilica.

And how for photos of Joni that are only on here just because she’s so darn cute!

There were also some super creepy statues in there…

There was even a dude that had a ton of babies on him! Go babies!

And then I got a chance to get a higher res version of this photo.

And then for no reason at all, I took a picture of this!

It might just be a parking lot, but I think it’s neat!

Once we were all worn out and had seen as much Vatican museum as we could handle, we headed back to the hostel for our lunch. We had leftover bread and miscellaneous sides from last night. We then decided to try the Internet computer in the lobby. Big mistake! We discovered that they have wireless here. It’s just a weak signal, in our room so we didn’t notice. We’ve been here catching up on Internet stuff for a few hours now. Joni has fallen asleep and I’m just getting pictures off the camera. I guess we’ll just have to see if we go back out!

Well, post-not-going-out update! We didn’t really go out at all. We ran downstairs to to the grocery store next door and grabbed a little food. We then sat around talking with Erin and Kelsey for a bit and finished with some blogging. We also cracked open this devil:

That’s a Ben 10 themed Children’s Surprise Egg! I won’t bore you with this too much, but it’s nothing too exciting. All you get is a little plastic statue of a Ben 10 character that doesn’t move or anything. It’s kinda lame. Noteworthy bit though: it doesn’t include the little white chocolate film that the normal ones do.

So that’s it for the night. Joni slept and I blogged. Tomorrow we’re hoping to hit the old part of the city. We’ll see how ambitious we are!