Travel Break: Rome (part 1)

So I just arrived back this morning from two of the most amazing weeks of my life! I visited five countries outside Denmark (if you count the Vatican), saw SOOOO much, including a whole lot of things I completely was not expecting to see. (Seriously, who knew the Bust of Nefertiti was in Berlin?) In the past two weeks, I took almost 900 photos, used four different types of currency, met fellow travelers from countless places and had the time of my life!
The first place I visited was Rome. Rome was unique among the cities I visited because I traveled with DIS, which was nice, because it left a whole lot less organizing for me to do, and I got to do and see a lot that I would not have known about otherwise. My trip to Rome was dominated by seeing some great sites and eating even greater food. But on that note, I apologize if this blog post is basically a long list of Roman sculptures, buildings and meals..
Also, this may be a long post! Sorry!

Day 1
The first day of my trip began with an extremely early wakeup. I had to get to the airport by 5:30 in the morning, which is before the regular busses run, meaning that we initally thought we were going to have to take the night bus to get to the airport that early. Fortunately one of the Danish people that lives in our building offered to give us a ride, which was extremely generous and saved us a whole lot of hassle.
When we first arrived in Rome, one of the first things that I noticed was the strange bathroom in our room. By this I mean there was a bidet. I just don't get bidets, but I'm not going to go much more into that. The next thing I noticed was the weather. It was so warm I didn't even need my jacket and there palm trees everywhere. I knew Rome was pretty far south, but I didn't really it would look that beautiful!
Next we had a walk around some of the local sites. Rome has some truly amazing sites. It was amazing how we'd just be walking through city streets and then you turn the corner and BAM, there's a major ancient monument. That was my introduction to the Pantheon, which was an amazing and beautiful building, inside and outside. The ceiling of the Pantheon was one of my favorite parts, with it's HUGE dome and giant hole in the middle. And all around the sides of the Pantheon there were various Christian shrines, from when the Christians decided that they didn't want a giant Pagan temple in the middle of their empire. But still, the inside was extremely impressive.

The Pantheon

Me in the Pantheon

We also saw a number of obelisks, tall skinny stone towers, including a famous one designed by Bernini with a stone elephant at the bottom. Another one of my favorite sites was the Trevi Fountain. This was the very first real site I saw in Rome, and wow is it impressive. It's a giant fountain, which if you throw money into then supposedly you are guarenteed to return to Rome. At first I was going to throw a Danish kroner in, but I wasn't sure if the fountain Gods would accept foreign currency so I threw in fifty Euro cents to be safe. I figured it was worth it to guarentee my future visit to Rome. Interestingly, all the coins thrown into the fountain are vacuumed out of the fountain daily and donated to feeding the hungry. Walking by the fountain on a later day, we actually saw the giant vacuums used to pick up the coins and all you could hear was the noise of clanging metal as the coins were sucked up.

Trevi Fountain

Yet another highlight of the day was the Largo Argentina, which is a small grassy patch of ruins in the middle of some very busy streets. The ruins themselvers were cool and provided a very nice view, but honestly not that amazing compared to some of the ones I saw later on the trip. The interesting part of the Largo Argentina was the cats. Hundreds of them. Literally. They were all over the ruins, climbing all over the fallen columns and crumbling foundations. Basically, a woman runs a shelter for stray cats there. And even though there are hundreds of cats, she knows every single one of them. When a single cat goes missing, she knows and puts up signs for it around the area. I found that really amazing.
We also made it to the Piazza Navona, which is an amazingly large fountain in the middle of a square, the Spanish Steps, which are a beautiful, even if tourist covered, set of stairs leading up to a very old church, and the Ara Pacis. The Ara Pacis is an altar to peace made in around 10 BC, just blows my mind. It is still in amazing condition. All of this intricate carved marble artwork is still standing after 2000 years. And what wasn't still in perfect condition was reconstructed amazingly, with outlines of what they think the sculptures would have looked like.

Piazza Navona

Spanish Steps

Ara Pacis

In addition to some fantastic sites, I also ate some fantastic food on the first day. For lunch, we had pizza, except it was like amazing and delicious, with giant chunks of real mozzerella cheese. For dinner, there was lasagna and wine! (They really love to serve wine at restaurants in Rome. We discovered that it was cheaper to buy wine than water, which is kind of cool, but also somewhat frustrating to me, as someone who really just loves to drink water with dinner.) And of course there was gelato. There are so many gelato shops in Rome. There are literally multiple gelato shops on every city block. From the one across from our room, I had the creamiest, chocolatiest gelato I have ever had. It was at this point that my friends and I made the pact to have gelato every day in Rome.

Day 2
Our second day, like the first day, included more amazing sites and more amazing food. Certainly the most famous of these sites is one that I have been wanting to see for as long as I can remember: The Colosseum. And it really was amazing as I had always imagined it. It was big, beautiful, and mind-blowing to stand in. It just amazes me that such a huge structure is still standing. Among the other sites we saw that day was a strange giant white palace. It looked like a giant wedding cake, and really did not seem to fit in with the rest of the buildings around Rome, which are not quite as... ostentatious.

The Colosseum

Inside of the Colosseum

Wedding Cake

We also spent some time in the Imperial Forum, where there are a number of ruins, near the Colosseum. There were some impressive arches, the old senate house, and the temple of the vestal virgins, where an eternal flame was kept burning in ancient Rome. The forum was amazing because in the middle of it, you were just surrounded by these ancient ruins, which was really cool, to say the least. One thing that I didn't like, however, was that they put all these ugly modern marble sculptures around the forum. It just didn't seem to fit.

Temple of the Vestal Virgins

Ancient Temple in the Forum

Bird eye view of the Forum

Ugly Ugly Ugly

After the forum, we had some time on our own, during which me and a couple others visited the Capuccini Church, which is probably the creepiest, strangest thing I have ever seen. Honestly, words cannot even describe how creepy this place is. It's basically a collection of human bones and skeletons. They have several rooms just decorated with bones. There were full skeletons dressed up as monks, in various poses. There were chandeliers made of bones. There were walls decorated entirely with pelvises. There were even a number of very disturbing, child-size skeletons. And to top things off they were playing the creepiest music in the world.

Cappuccini Church: No photos allowed inside, this is a photo of my postcard

The food was great again today. For lunch, I had a panini sandwich with prosciutto and mozzarella, which was awesome. And of course we had our daily gelato, which I chose to get in the mint flavor that day. Dinner was gnocci, which I love as well.

Travel break to be continued...