Reasons I might actually be deadius; I haven't blogged in so long it's a reasonable conclusion or if I don't blog soon my parents might actually kill me.
Our second day in Rome we headed to the Vatican and Basilica di San
Pietro. Now Rome has an extensive train/metro system, it's made up of
two metro lines in a vaguely cross shape and then seven train lines,
the whole thing on a map looks kinda like this:
Vatican City is sort of below, between orange metro stops Cipro and
Ottaviano-S.Pietro. I have no idea where we got off but we did lots of
walking to get there. And it was very hot. And we were wearing
Pope-worthy covering clothes (or for those of us who weren't; carrying shawls). When we finally arrived (by way of
someone other than Manny navigating) we then had the debate of who
wanted to go where; a few of the girls had already been to the
Basilica or the Vatican Museum so all of us going to one was going to
be boring for someone. In the end most of us ended up deciding to go
to the Basilica leaving Manny and a few others to go to the museum or
shop until we were finished. Going to visit Basilica di San Pietro on
a Sunday; not advisable. Entry is however free on Sundays, this could
possibly be why the crowd was off the hook, but that could also have
been because we were in Pope-ville, on a Sunday. This is what Piazza
San Pietro looks like:
 |
| this lovely image is from GoogleMaps |
Now imagine the whole thing as a watch face so I can explain how busy
it was. Entry is at about 11 o'clock, you can see the little rat-race
thing there, and 6-8 was under construction or getting painted or
something so it was all blocked off. The line started at the rat-race,
went clockwise until it reached 6 o'clock and them doubled back to
about 5 o'clock, that's where we got in it. It's safe to say we got to
know each other quite well while we were in at line, in the middle of
the day, with little shade.
 |
| Malin, Mollie & Chloe |
 |
| Mollie |
 |
| Mollie, Maria, Elina |
 |
| Ellie, Malin, Tash, Elina, Mollie, Chloe |
By the time the we'd got to 6 o'clock and then all the way back to 4
o'clock we'd been in the line for 40/45 minutes. At this point the
Pope appeared. Well in theory it was the Pope, a window opened in the
top of a building and a little red carpet was draped out it and then
an old man appeared and started talking. It was actually rather
impressive he talked in Italian, French, German and English but I'm
not sure what else. It could have been a puppet or a stunt double, but
it was probably the Pope. A fantastic thing happened while the Pope
was talking (which he did for quite a while). A whole bunch of people
in the line decided that they'd be better able to hear him if they
stood in the middle of the Piazza, this in fact is probably not true
as there where speakers all the way around but anyway, and just
abandoned waiting. This means that when it hit an hour of us being in
line we were well around and just a little shy of reaching 12.
 |
| Pope |
When you get to the edge of the rat-race it's a little deceiving; you
think you're almost through, when in actual fact it just fills up with
people and smooshes you together like sardines. There is actually one
good thing about this, it means that you can duck into the shade of
other people's umbrellas while you wait. Once you've gone through
airport style security it thins out quite a bit and you're free to
wander around the the Basilica. It's really rather huge, but
personally I didn't think it was that impressive (other than the
size).
 |
| Obligatory 'I'm in the Basilica' photo |
After we'd had a good look around it was getting close to the
time we were supposed to meet up with the others so we had a decision
to make; postpone meet up and wait in another (seemingly unmoving
line) to go to the top of the Basilica or trudge off to find water,
the others and food. There was only me and one other girl who really
wanted to go to the top, and the rest refused to stand in line any
more, wanting to sit down and eat rather than wait an extra hour and
be able to say they looked down on Rome from the top of the Pope's
Basilica. So we headed out. Into a practically empty piazza. Moral of
the story; if you want to visit the Basilica, go at 1pm (and don't
chicken out of going to the top just because you're tired).
After we'd refuelled and had another lengthy discussion about where we
would go next we headed off to find Trevi Fountain (deciding not to go
to the Vatican Museum because we didn't have time to look at it all
before it closed). Somehow we though it was a good idea to walk there,
but it really wasn't. It's only 2.5km and straight most of the way but
somehow we managed to get very lost and despite the fact Manny kept
asking for directions (from shop owners) we ended up having to back
track quite a bit. We eventually fount it, did the obligatory money
throwing and picture taking before getting gelato and heading off back
to to hotel nap, and get ready to go back into central Rome for
dinner.
I've now also added the photos to 'Postius about Romius 1'
