Blogs from Europe - page 11705

Early in the morning we left our apartment in Rome and joined the line to enter the Vatican Museum. I had heard that the line here can sometimes stretch on for hours, but to our surprise we were inside the museum after only waiting for about twenty minutes. I had also heard that the Vatican was pretty strict about maintaining a modest dress code, which really didn't seem to be the case either. In the museum we joined and English language tour which included all of us wearing pretty stylish headphones and walking around in a pack. It was funny to see all the naked statues that had leaves glued to their crotches so as to make them suitable to be shown at the Vatican. Also, I was surprised at all the stuff the early Catholics ... read more

Having been awarded one of only fifteen places on the Media Net Academy at the Churches Media Council Conference, turned up excited by the prospect of three days at working at the crossover between the media (specifically, the web/internet) and Christianity. The general gist, as I understand it, is that many Christians see the media as a place of ‘evil’, and by encouraging more young Christians into the media maybe we can change the perception of this… We were soon introduced to each other as a big group, then divided into streams. Our ‘web stream’ was Elizabeth (a journalist), Fran (PR), Gareth (radio DJ), and myself. Rachel, our trainer, talked us through our aims for the site, etc, and then introduced us to ‘wetpaint’ so that we could concentrate on site structure and content, rather than ... read more

Photos for now, text to follow ... read more

2 decisions - that despite the fact that I keep doing silly things like loosing passports I apppear to be able to rise above such inconveniences and that despite a torrential downpour on/off beach (12th) me and my new bulgarian phone are unstoppable even when edging towards the wet T shirt brigade (along with half Varna populous). 2 Rakias and a cheese -filled pancake helped a treat. Made the (free) hostel pickup and on way home visited a deli/butcher, coming away with 1and half kilo piece of pork for £3.50!! Yes please life is good and today I move banks, pickup my passport letter for Sofia (consulate) and visit my house in conjunction with Katia hopefully.This will be the first time she has seen it.We also will see the other property of Kapitals in that village ... read more

We made it! Sarah and I arrived in Reykjavik arond 2am EST ....7am in Iceland. We were totally dazed and confused, running on adrenaline. What we didn't realize is that the International airport is about 45 minutes from the city of Reykjavik and that the area in between is completely uninhabited. Miles and miles of volcanic rock with the only vegetation being mosses and lupine. It was beautiful, unlike anything we have ever seen before. The guesthouse where we stayed for the night was really cute, about a 15 minute walk from the town center. Once we dropped off our bags and found some coffee, we decided the best way to handle our jetlag would be to soak in the blue lagoon. The blue lagoon is a geothermally heated pool about 40 minutes outside of ... read more