Day Eleven: Vatican and Rome

We woke up this morning like a couple of lazy bones. We knew we didn't have to be at the Vatican until 10:15, which left us with a real lack of urgency since all of our previous tours had a start time of 9am the latest. We had a leisurely breakfast and laughed to ourselves about another couple at the hostel who thought they were leaving early enough to miss the lines at the Colosseum (spoiler alert: getting to the Colosseum at 10am is NOT early enough to miss the lines) and we eventually set off.

When we got to the subway, I noticed with alarm that it was already after 10am. Joel and I both looked at each other in confusion, not really sure where the time went, both hoping that we would make it in time. The seconds and minutes clicked by and it was 10:30 on the dot when we made it to the train station.

Then, we had to walk to the Vatican. For some reason, I had thought that the train station would be right near the museum. Not so. We walked for ten minutes to the meeting point, and the group was nowhere to be found. I went to the gate of the Museum, and a guard told me that we did in fact miss the group. He thought that our tour company had a group every hour, so he suggested we go back to the meeting point. I was fairly certain that he was wrong, and that they only had a group at 10:30 and one at 2:00, but I decided to follow his advice anyway.

Fortunately for us, we saw some people with the blue Dark Rome shirts on and I ran towards them. They couldn't get us in to the Vatican right then, since we missed the time window, but one of them called the main office and was able to reschedule our tickets for 2pm. I even asked if they had any room in their guided tour for us to upgrade, but they didn't. Since it was now barely 11am, this left us with three hours to kill, and my whole plan for the day all screwed up.

I decided that we should hit up Castel Sant'Angelo first, since I remembered it being a beautiful view from the top. The last time I was there, however, I didn't explore the rest of the site. We ended up spending a good deal of time walking in and out of the rooms of the castle, looking at paintings, ornate furniture, and old armor and weapons. The view from the top of the castle was just as beautiful as I remembered. When we were done looking around, we considered having lunch at a café on one of the lower levels of the castle. However, there were no tables with a view, the food was grossly overpriced and looked crappy, and I was melting in the heat. I also didn't want to take any chances of us missing the next tour.

We started back towards the Vatican, taking bets as to how long the line would be when we got there. When we turned the corner, we were both shocked to find that there was virtually no line at all. We ended up eating lunch at another uninspiring touristy restaurant. Joel was perusing the menu and decided that the only thing he wanted was spaghetti and meatballs. While this may be an iconic Italian food in America, real Italians do not mix meatballs and spaghetti. They are two separate courses. So, when Joel tried to order it, the spaghetti was served at the same time as my pasta dish, without the meatballs. The waiter was very confused when Joel then asked for the meatballs also, and I'm sure he was horrified when Joel gleefully dumped them on his plate and ate them together with the spaghetti.

We went to the meeting point half an hour early and were repeatedly accosted by men trying to sell us scarves. They were persistent and obnoxious and would not take no for an answer. I had already had to buy one useless scarf on this trip, so I was unable to be coerced. Finally, the tour guide arrived and took us over to the museum.

If I had paid money originally for the 2pm time slot just to skip the line, I would have been royally pissed off. There was absolutely no line, and we walked right in. The service that I got mistakenly booked for was completely useless at 2pm. There was nothing that the guide did for us that we couldn't have done for ourselves. She basically walked us in and got our tickets for us before sending us on our merry way.

We got stopped several times over the course of the afternoon by security guards wanting to inspect Jesse's chair. Tripods are not allowed in the Vatican Museum so they all wanted to make sure we hadn't snuck in a tripod. Joel joked to me later that it IS actually a tripod, just not the kind they were concerned about.

The Vatican Museum is vast. That's really the only way to describe it. There is so much stuff to see there. The guide who got us into the museum told us it would take over three hours to see just the highlights. Fortunately for us, we are rather fast museum observers, so it only took us a little over two hours and we saw pretty much the whole thing. I was pretty disappointed in how much was closed off, however. There were entire corridors and rooms of sculptures that I know I got to see up close and personal the last time I was in Rome that we didn't get to see at all. It was disappointing, because both of us love sculpture more than most other art forms. The Egyptian hallway was really cool though, and I had never seen that before.

After we were done in the Museum, we walked around the walls so that we could go in to St. Peter's Basilica. Of course, as soon as we entered the courtyard, I realized just how badly AAVacations screwed up my day. The line was so long, it went out the courtyard to the street. It seemed to be moving at an okay pace, but it was in the blazing hot sun. I left it up to Joel whether we would wait in the line or not, since I had already seen St. Peter's, and he decided we should just skip it. I'm still a little bit peeved about it, because I had expected to get a guided tour of the Vatican and St. Peter's and almost got to see neither.

Instead of waiting in the line, we walked to Piazza Navona. I almost had a pee crisis, but I found a disgusting underground public bathroom that for once didn't charge for use. This was a good thing, because I probably would have peed all over the floor while I scrounged around looking for coins. Sidebar here: In the words of Mrs. Doubtfire, if I ever meet the misogynistic bastard who invented toilets without toilet seats, I'll kill him. Seriously, who thought that was a good idea? Even better is when the toilets don't have toilet PAPER either. Vile.

After Piazza Navona, we walked to the Pantheon. We walked into the square in front of the building and I kept looking at Joel's face for a reaction, and somehow he still wasn't seeing that we actually were there. It was funny, I had to gesture wildly and point out to him the magnificent building right in front of us. We went inside briefly to look at how it had been transformed into a church and then we took a rest on the steps before continuing onward.

Next stop was the Trevi Fountain. We stopped in a cool spice shop along the way where Joel bought some new ingredients for the meal he was planning on cooking that evening. The Trevi Fountain was ridiculously crowded and I was unable to find a tourist who could take a decent picture of us in front of it. It was a little bit aggravating. A man with a hokey Polaroid came up and offered to take our picture with my camera, and we only let him once he promised we wouldn't have to pay anything. Of course, once he took the pictures, he tried to convince us to let him take a picture with HIS camera and then pay for it. We declined and left the area because we were tired of having wet bums from sitting on the lip of the fountain. We walked to the Spanish Steps and took some pictures there before heading back to the B&B.

Joel plays Where's Waldo? at the Spanish Steps

Joel asked Giacomo's permission to cook dinner again and Giacomo's face lit up like it was Christmas. He was so excited to have Joel's cooking that he offered to go pick up our laundry at the laundromat so Joel could stay behind and cook. The meal tonight was pasta with mushrooms and a saffron butter sauce. Delicious. We stayed up quite late visiting and chatting with Giacomo and three girls who were staying at the B&B, despite the fact that we needed to leave really early in the morning. It was a really great finish to our time in Rome.