Nov. 13, 2004 Our trip to Rome
Buongiorno Familia,
Actually it's night here but I haven't really heard them say good evening in italian. I looked up the spelling in one of Lynn's travel books. Yes, we're here in the ancient city of Rome. It is quite impressive with its historical settings. Besides getting ripped off by the taxi driver coming from the airport things have gone well. It is pretty chilly here. It was real windy yesterday. Today it drizzled some but not too badly. We went to the Colosseum yesterday afternoon, just on the outside. It was closed since it was Sunday. Today we went to St. Peter's Basilica which has St. Peter's Square and the big Catholic church there. That's where the Pieta' is (Mary holding Jesus after the crucifixion) and all the beautiful paintings on the raised ceilings. It's an enormous place. Unfortunately Jon had a knife and wasn't allowed to go in through the securuity area. This made Langston very unhappy for most of our time inside. We finallly came out so Bob and Lynn kept the knife so Jon could go in.
We also went to the Trezi fountain (where Three Coins and a Fountain was filmed) and the Spanish steps. I think the steps go up to a hotel. There's a huge poster of Ghandi there right now that says "If you're going to send a message, it must be a message of peace." We wanted to go to the Vatican Museum where the Sistene Chapel is but it was closed already. You'll have to watch Roman Holiday to get some glimpses of Rome.
I was surprised to see so much graffiti everywhere and the metro subway is covered with it. The city feels alot like London to me, just real big and dirty. We had to wait through several trains before we could get on one this evening at 5:30, after work traffic I suppose. They were crammed in there like sardines! There are signs saying watch out for pick pockets. As we were driving to our hotel in the taxi we saw several signs about Yasser Arafat saying "Thank you." I told Jon maybe it meant thank you for kicking the bucket! ;-)
So far Langston is most impressed by the hot chocolate, it's almost like pudding, the gelato, it's ice cream that's famous, and watching the cartoons this morning in Italian. He enjoyed the pigeons at St. Peter's too. He'd like to meet some friends ( I guess like we did on our Egypt trip) but I told him we may not find any friends his age. I sure don't see a lot of kids around these tour places. We started this trip with a runny nose. I've been giving him Silver Solution. He's definitely better. We stayed in the hotel tonight while the others ate across the street. The food is really so good and pretty inexpensive.
Joan gets the Golden Writing award for sending me email at our hotel!!! For her award she gets a free metro ticket or maybe the losers should get that. Ha!
Posted by nellie at November 29, 2004 08:44 PM