Christmas in Rome

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For my first Christmas away from home, Kai and I decided to spend it in Rome. We took at train from Cortona on Christmas Eve and stayed in hotel near the train station. We walked around the first night and saw a few sights after dinner. We turned on the TV back in our room that night and were surprised to see the Christmas Eve service at the Vatican being broadcasted. We had a bottle of wine while watching the Italian commentary. We saw the Vatican with our own eyes the next morning. The front desk clerk at our hotel said the Pope would speak at 9:30, so we arrived at 9 but there weren't large crowds. There were seats set out but no one was in them. We figured he spoke earlier and we missed it, and we were really disappointed about that. So we went inside the church and got some amazing pictures. There is so much gold in there! It's very elaborate, we were in there for over an hour admiring all the work it much have taken to construct and preserve. When we came out, we noticed there were a lot of people waiting by the barricade to the seats. We decided to wait a few minutes to see if they were waiting for the Pope. At 11am, we were allowed to sit down. We got really got really good seats by the aisle and waited patiently. By noon, the Vatican was filled with thousands of people waiting for the Pope to make his famous Christmas day speech. The bells began to ring and we heard trumpets in the distance. They got closer and closer until we saw the marching band come down the aisle toward to the front of the church. They had colorful costumes on and they all looked very serious. There was a second marching band and a few groups of armed forces. The processional ended with a few moments of silence, then the Pope emerged from behind the red curtain on the balcony. There were two large screens near the people that showed us his face up-close. My face came up on the big screen!! They only showed a few people and I was one of them! That was really cool, I guess the camera man like me because I was smiling. Pope Benedict spoke in Latin, which almost no one in the crowd understood I assume. There were a lot of nuns and priests standing at another large balcony watching the speech, so maybe they knew what he was talking about. At the end of his speech, we said a Christmas greeting in at least 30 languages! I heard it was 60 which may be true. "Eng-lay-say" was one of the first he spoke in, wishing us peace and joy on this day. First he said the language he was about to speak in and then the greeting. When he got to Spanish, parts of the crowd went wild. They were very proud. People shouted for other languages too, it was a really cool experience. It sounded like he articulated each language very well, and he made no mistakes while speaking Latin. I could tell that he is a very wise and well-spoken person. After he finished his speech, the crowd cheered for a few minutes while the marching bands made their musical exit. After we left, we started a big day of sight-seeing. We saw so much! I can't remember the names of all the monuments we saw, but there was one right after another! I've never been to a city with so many sites. We walked around the town all day. We were pretty tired but I took hundreds of pictures and was really enjoying myself. We had the best dinner of our vacation that night at a place called Macaroni. Kai bought me a meal of chicken in this amazing wine sauce - wow!! He got lamb and we also had wine, appetizers, and bread. It was a really romantic dinner. As we were walking home, we ran into a group of people our age speaking English - now this is rather rare! So we just walked with them and blended into this big group. It was a pub crawl and we ended up at a Scottish pub where we got a few drinks and heard some American dance music. While waiting in line to enter the pub, Kai recognized a guy who went to his school in Sweden! Small world huh?! The next day we went through the Roman Forum and the outside of the Colosseum. We saw some other sites but were pretty exhausted. We went to a part of town where we got an amazing view of the city at night. We had a few glasses of wine before walking back toward our hotel. We were on the look out for a good place to eat, and it took a while to find the right place. We almost gave in and got Burger King but then we found a nice restaurant where I got veal and Kai got some seafood dinner that I didn't think looked appetizing, but he liked it. The service was really good that night and it was a really pleasant dinner. That night we stayed in a youth hostel to save some money. The next morning, I woke up to the girl next to me asking if I had seen her backpack. Turns out she was using her laptop the night before and put it in the bag and shoved it under her bed. In the middle of the night, our other roommate stole the backpack. I felt so bad for her, but she wasn't being very smart. She kept her laptop, camera, passport, and wallet all in the same bag! All of it was taken so she had to spend the next two days without any money in Rome until she could go to the American embassy. Most likely, she had to stay in Rome for 2 more weeks after that waiting for paperwork. Nothing was stolen from Kai and I, we were more protective of our stuff and didn't bring laptops for that very reason. We left that hostel for the train station where we left for Ancona, a coastal city of Italy. The train ride was really nice, we went through a lot of big hills and the landscape was beautiful. We had a little big of time in Ancona to get some groceries and find the ferry. We took a ferry that night all the way to Patras, Greece! The ferry was so fun! It was a lot like the one I took back on my Birthday when we went to Estonia. I'm excited to take more ferries in the future, they are really fun. Rome is a really amazing city, I hope I can go back someday!

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Photos

me and the Pope
and a bottle of wine

Buried Popes Here
This section is blocked off - I think because there are Popes buried here...I think...