Tuesday, April 17, 2012

My Roman Holiday (aka the longest blog post ever)

Now that I've successfully turned in my monster-sized paper for Cinema, I can finally put up Rome pictures/stories! They're only a month late, don't worry about it. :P

Story number 1 for Rome, and probably the most hectic story that I have from SB12, is the story of that time Kyle and I almost missed our flight from Paris to Rome. Our flight left from the Beauvais airport at 9:30, and Beauvais is 1 1/2 hours away from Paris proper by bus, so Kyle and I were supposed to take the bus at 6:30. This meant that we needed to meet at the subway by 5:30, since we only had an elementary knowledge of the metro system, and we wanted ample time for mistakes. That is hella early. I went out the night before, because I'm dumb, so I got an hour of sleep, and got myself to the metro about 15 mins late.

However, there was no Kyle to be found! I waited for her for about 15 mins, in a groggy stupor, looking at all the business people taking the metro that early in the morning, wondering what kind of horrible job you have to have that requires getting up that early. I finally snapped out of it and realized that our bus left in half an hour, so I needed to find out what was up with Kyle. Of course, my phone decided to break as soon as I got to France, so I had no phone. This meant that I had to go back to Sarah's apartment and call Kyle using Sarah's phone. By the time I woke Sarah up enough to let me in and called Kyle, it was 6:30. My phone call woke her up -she had set her phone for PM instead of AM.

We had obviously missed the bus we were supposed to take, but I found another bus at 7:30,and we decided to go for that one. We tried quite valiantly, but alas, we ran from the metro up to the bus stop in time to see our bus drive away. ASLDJFDS. At this point, I refused to miss our flight, even though we were a mere 2 hours away from lift-off, and still 90 mins from the airport. Kyle found a taxi and we hopped in, and told the man that our flight left at 9:30. He sped us to the airport and figured out which terminal we needed to go to, which was very nice of him, except that he then charged us 145 euro. Yes. 145 euro for a cab ride. It was ridiculous.

We arrived at the airport at 9, when the plane started boarding. When we ran up to the checking desk to get our boarding tickets stamped, there was no line for the Rome flight - it was all shut down, because we were supposed to be, you know, boarding the plane. The nice man at the deskgot all concerned about us and took us to the front of the security line, so that we whizzed through and successfully made it to the plane at about 9:20. Exhausted, we collapsed on the first seats we saw and slept our way to Rome.

This beginning did not augur well for the rest of our stay in Rome, but thankfully the rest of our stay was wonderfully tranquil, and I got to dork out over the ruins and the Vatican! :)

Rome's cityscape

View from a park we found

Trevi Fountain! We saw it at night and threw coins, like good tourists.

Spanish Steps

Roman ruins - I think this is Titus' arch?

ohmygoodnesss it's the Colosseum

Chillin'

More ruins!

Roman Forum

A street performer in Piazza Navona

Monument to Vittorio Emanuele II

PANTHEON

Raphael's "School Of Athens"

Outside St. Peter's Basilica! :)

Pieta, what alsdfkjlsadkjfadklfjs

Inside St. Peter's - the rays of light were *perfect*

Bernini's Chair of St. Peter

Tiber! So much Roman murder happened here! ...The classics can be gory.

I could not go to the Borghese to see most of Bernini's works, but at least I saw St. Theresa :)

I know that I just put everyone's brain in picture overload, and I apologize for that. There was just so much to see in Rome! As an art lover and a classicist, I almost died of happiness in Rome. It was pure bliss.

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