More On Rome

Christina and I were on vacation for 6 days...so it's hard for me to stay true to the daily events, but I'm gonna try my best. There was so much walking, food, and coffee it tends to blur at times. But day two started with a pretty huge undertaking: The Vatican. Now if you go to Rome, you gotta go to the Vatican. But needless to say, it's huge, overwhelming, and a tourist trap extraordinaire. Prior to deciding to take the trip together, we talked about our opinions on sight-seeing...I am very much against the whole bus tour and running around all day trying to see as many sights as possible. I would rather see a couple of important sights and spend the majority of my time discovering the place I'm visiting. Christina was more evenly minded about it...she wasn't against organized tours, just in moderation. So I agreed to doing one guided tour that was a few hours in length (not on a bus!)...at the Vatican, which of all the guided tours, is the wisest, in my opinion since the Vatican is so vast. We went with Viator. And it was worth it. Our tour guide was an archeologist, and knew so much about the Vatican and St. Peter's Basilica. Plus we skipped the lines. There's no way you can see everything in the Vatican in a couple of hours or even days, but I was absolutely done by the end. It was fascinating and beautiful, but it was too much and it needed to just end! Having said that, I'm glad Christina convinced me to do that tour, because with so much to see, it's good to have someone showing you selected parts of the museum and giving you interesting factoids. Speaking of factoids, as you probably know, Vatican City is literally its own country, with its own citizens, currency, and ATM machines that function only in Latin! So after we headed over to Via Ottaviano, which is nearby. Back in the day (aka when I last went to Rome in college) it was a hot spot for me to go shopping for affordable clothing. We ended up checking out some shoe stores. At some point we made our way back home to the hotel and were zonked out. I think by the end of that day Christina may have secretly wanted to lose me somewhere...I can get a lil' cranky when I do four hour tours in the Vatican with annoying know-it-all tourists who keep interrupting the tour guide and when there are seemingly thousands of tourists in every room you go to! God bless Christina for her patience...and thank God for her map reading abilities! We made a great team...I served as the Italian translator and communicator, and she was our navigator.