Day 17: Rome, Italy

This morning we woke up (and got up!) at 5:30 am. Our boat was at the Civitavecchia port and we were taking a tour to Rome. The bus drive was a little over an hour long since Civitavecchia is 70km from Rome. We had a tour director named Valaria and a shore excursion person from our ship named Rondovan ( originating in Croatia). When we got to Rome we also got a tour guide who was our Rome expert named Isabella. Our first stop was to St. Peter's Basilica in Vatican City. We walked around, prayed, and went down into the catacombs. We saw the grave of Pope John Paul II. We were there for 2 and a half hours. Then we got back to our bus and drove around downtown Rome to the main square where there are several famous monuments. Our bus driver had a difficult time using the streets because certain ones are closed on holidays. There was a demonstration at the Colosseum where thousands of people were matching, which also caused troubles for the bus driver to navigate.

After driving around for awhile, we ate a restaurant named "Ristorante Le Terme del Colosseo" for a 5 course meal consisting of bread, pasta, a mystery meat with potatoes, salad, and a custard with berries dish for dessert. When we got the main course, our table agreed that the meat was either chicken or turkey since it had gravy and was white meat. We ate, but were perplexed by the taste not being distinguishable between chicken and turkey. While eating the next course, our tour guide Valaria came over and Christine asked her what kind of meat it was. She said cow. We all said, "nnnoooo....that is not cow--it is fowl of some sort". She said, "No. Cow". We said, "mmooo? cow?" She confirmed and said, "Little, baby cow". Again, we were all in denial. Saying "veal?! noooooo....it is not veal...". Christine and Kim are NOT veal eaters. We hate the thought of where that meat comes from. So the waiter from the restaurant came over and Christine asked him what kind of meat was served. He said, "Veal". Most of our table was horrified...veal was definitely not a meat any of us wanted to eat, and we all felt kind of saddened by it.

After lunch we walked to the Colosseum and looked at the outside (because it was May Day - Italian Labor Day, we couldn't go inside) and heard about all of the monuments around. We lost two people from our group for about 20 minutes. Rome is a very crowded, busy place. If they weren't found, they would have had to take alternate transportation back. A taxi back to the ship would have been 300 Euro. They were found right before the guides were about to move on to our next area because they were throwing our itinerary off.

We walked to St. Clement's Basilica to go under the church. It was built on top of another church from the 4th century which was built onto another house and warehouse from the 1st century. The top church is a medieval church. It has a huge mosaic over the alter which portrayed life of every living creature. Mosaics had not yet become popular when this once was made, but it was very beautiful.

After visiting St. Clement's Basilica, we drove past St. Peter's Basilica. We also drove by "The Statue of the Virgin Mary that Cried Real Blood Tears", which is in Civitavecchia. Our tour guide told us the story of the statue crying blood tears in 1995 and it being a miracle. Here is a website (though just google search "Statue Blood Tears Civitavecchia" and a lot of articles and debates can be found): http://www.visionsofjesuschrist.com/weeping63.htm

We drove back to the ship, then got some dinner. We sat at a window seat for awhile, continuing to document what our pics are of.

Christine has been feeling under the weather for the past couple of days so she told Kim she was going to take a nap. Kim decided to take a nap. Kim decided to take one too. This was one of the first nights we went to bed at a reasonable time. We wanted our "nap" to just become bedtime, but we had plans to meet up with Miguel. Christine got up to meet him and Kim continued sleeping. Christine went up to tell him that we wouldn't be there because we needed to sleep, but ended up talking to a bunch of people for about an hour. She talked to some of the ship dancers who were very nice. A girl from England suprisingly knew where Rochester, NY was because she was a dancer at Darien Lake for a summer. Small world! Afterwards, Christine went to bed and slept like a baby.

---

---