Day 3, Wednesday, Nov. 26th

Honeymoon Day 3, Wednesday, Nov. 26th

We intended to make Day 3 the “Good Catholics” Day of our trip. We headed to the train station and took Rome’s subway system, the Metro, to Vatican City. After getting a little bit turned around (darn those lack of street signs!) we finally headed in the right direction and made our first stop at St. Peter’s Square and St. Peter’s Basilica. Like so many other sights in Italy, this was absolutely breathtaking. The massive structures, wide open spaces, incredible architecture, and religious significance, it’s all amazing. I was instantly hit with a palpable sense of serenity and peacefulness. The Democrat and I decided to be adventurous, so after touring the church, we decided to climb to the top of the Cupola (or Dome for you Americans) of the Basilica. We first walked up four stories to get to the roof level – we could have taken the elevator up these four stories, but that would have cost an additional 4 Euros. So we hoofed it, and promised to do something fun with those 4 saved Euros. After reaching the roof, there were another 320 steps to reach the pinnacle – with each step up, the stairwell became narrower and steeper. At the top, we were rewarded with an incredible 360 degree view of Rome. By Italian law, nothing in Rome can be higher than St. Peter’s Basilica, so we stayed for a while ohhing and ahhing, and we snapped a ton of pictures from the pinnacle of Rome.

After St. Peter’s, we walked over to the Vatican to see the Pope’s residence and tour the Vatican Museum. I know very little about art, so a lot of this museum was wasted on me. But, I appreciate hard work and know that the incredible masterpieces that fill this place must have been really tough projects. The very little I know about art does include an awareness of the Sistine Chapel, and how Michaelangelo painted the interior roof of the Sistine Chapel, over a multi-year period, mostly from an inverted position. What I did not know is that the Vatican Museum really only exists to showcase the Sistine Chapel. From the second you walk in, you’ll see signs that direct you to Sistine Chapel, giving you the impression that it’s just around the corner. But it’s not. You have no choice but to walk through floor after floor, room after room of other exhibits before you can get to the Sistine Chapel. And every step along the way, you’ll catch a “Sistine Chapel à” that makes you [mistakenly] think you’ve gotten to it. But you haven’t. And finally when you can’t take it anymore, when you are just about to break the silence of the Vatican Museum by screaming “Enough already! The Sistine Chapel is not around the corner! Stop lying to me!’…. you arrive at the Sistine Chapel. No photographs are allowed inside, so if you haven’t seen it yourself, you’ll just have to trust me that it was awesome. And it was, but we were so exhausted after the St. Peter’s trek and 1.5 hour hunt for the Sistene Chapel, that we didn’t have too much energy to stick around and admire its awesome-ness.

We said good-bye to Vatican City, checked our stomachs and decided it was time to eat.
Pizza eaten: We shared prosciutto and cheese slice (delicious!) and a mushroom slice. The mushrooms on this slice were even slimier than the day before, but this time I was not so hungry that I did not notice. I decided these would be my last mushrooms in Italy.
Gelato eaten: Combination of amazing chocolate and Mr. Nico (very similar to Mr. Goodbar for you Americans) in a chocolate dipped waffle cone.

After our all-day excursion, we rested, freshened up and then headed to a late dinner at some place called Avenue Q. This restaurant was recommended to us by our hotel concierge and described as being a fun place with “live music”. When we got there, we realized that “live music” in Rome means an individual who plays a small electronic keyboard next to the bartender. I say individual because The Democrat and I never could definitively decide whether this individual was a man or a woman. Regardless, when the singer saw The Democrat and I walk in, the singer started playing all the American songs in his/her repertoire, which included: Bee Gees: Staying Alive, Louie Armstrong: What a Wonderful World. He/She made it clear that these songs were for us. Dinner was a little disappointing for me; I tried to be adventurous in my food selection, only to discover that Spaghetti Carbonara is disgusting. Luckily I did not go hungry, since in the two hours before getting to Avenue Q, I had already consumed two appetizers, two glasses of wine, and the pizza/gelato described above.

The Democrat and I decided that we did not want to act like an old married couple, so we stopped by a few bars on the way back to our hotel. We came across a few interesting European characters. One guy introduced himself to us and told us that he was in Rome because he’d recently inherited money and wanted to take his girlfriend on a shopping spree. Another guy kicked in the door (not sure why) of the single stall bathroom that three girls were occupying (also not sure why), but no one besides me and The Democrat seemed to notice or care. At the first bar, I decided to try a local drink, so I asked for the same bright pink drink that the girl next to me was drinking, something called the COCOLOCO. I’m not sure what was in it, but within an hour, the COCOLOCO kicked in and we were forced to call it an early night. That’s when The Democrat banned COCOLOCOs from the remainder of our trip.