Sunday, April 19, 2009

Spring Break


For the most part this has been a very uneventful spring break. Everybody was out of town so I spent a good deal of time just sitting around catching up on movies. However, yesterday I arrived home from my big trip to Rome. Rome is an amazing city. I arrived by plane during sunset to see the colosseum and Vatican on my side of the plane. It was a great site and pumped me up to see the city. I went out on the town that night for some pizza and a glass of wine. There are restaurants and bars everywhere and it is hard to choose a good one to settle on. I found some great pizza and listened to Italian singers and it was a nice night. I went back to my hostel fairly early so I could get up early and see the city. That night I could not sleep at all (hostels are not my favorite place). I ended up just giving up at 6am and hitting the town instead of waiting for a walking tour at 10. It was a great choice. I was there for the opening of St Peter Basilica so at 7am I walk in with maybe 40 other people and it is just us and the priests and nuns. If you can only see one thing in Rome it should be that church. It is like 4 cathedrals under one roof. I can't even begin to describe the statues and painting that were all there. It is just something you have to experience. It is a testament to the inspiration of God on people. The rest of the day I spent walking the couple miles back to my hostel. Almost all the old plazas and main sites are on that route so I zig zagged around the city looking at as much as I could. I stopped for some awesome coffee and pateries, too. It was a great day, and one thing I did that I didn't think I would do as much of was stop in most of the churches I saw. I could not believe that every church was a huge cathedral. There are more than 400 churches and while I only saw a dozen, each was spectacular and almost off of them held masterpieces in art and sculptures. 6 hours later I went back to the hostel and took a small name and then headed off for an early evening view of the colosseum and ancient ruins. The next morning (after another sleepless night) I beat the crowds to the Vatican Museum to see all the masterpieces and historical artifacts of Christendom over the last 2000 and more years. They even had Egyptian artifacts and mummys. Crazy huh? I finished up at a awesome cafe and looking at the supposed chains that Peter wore during his imprisonment in Jerusalem. I ended up seeing a friend from school on my flight home so that was a nice finish to a great trip. Pictures are up. Enjoy.

Sunday, April 12, 2009

Easter

This is my first Easter away from home. It has been quite around here because of spring break. I only plan on going to Rome next week for 2 days so it has been a lot of vegging around until then. One cool thing I did do is go see Scotland's great wall. Its a stone wall built by the Romans and it goes from sea to sea. It was cool to see the wall, but the museums were the really cool part. The sites are still being explored by archaeologists so all the things in the museum are from about 100 yards away and almost 2000 years old. Crazy. Other than that... not too much is happening. Happy Easter.