To a certain someone, this post will seem very familiar. Since I am lazy, I took an email that I wrote and modified to form my Italy post. Pictures will follow in the next few days, I promise.
I consider myself extremely blessed to have had the chance to go to Italy. It was an amazing trip. I saw all the big stuff. And I mean big. Colosseum, Arch of Constantine, Pantheon, Trevi Fountain, Vatican, Pompeii. It was fantastic. I took about 250 pictures while I was there, and the highlights will be blogged...sometime.
Let's see, we flew into Rome on Sunday, where we stayed for two days. The first day, the weather was absolutely perfect. So we set out almost immediately (we took a short nap to help with the jet lag) to explore the city of Rome. That place is beautiful. I was taking pictures like crazy until my uncle slowed me down. Seriously, you could point your camera in any direction, at any spot in that city and come away with a great picture. I just liked walking around there. Good thing too, because that's how we got everywhere.
We went to the Colosseum first, and lucked out because Sunday was European Heritage Day, and admission was free (11 euros saved right off the bat!) Then we ate supper at some sidewalk restaurant. The food in Italy is delicious. All of it. The whole time we were there I had no bad food.
The next day it rained, but that wasn't so bad since we slept until nearly one in the afternoon (jet lag again...). That day we went to the Vatican. I can't really describe it adequately in words, but when you see the pictures, just know that they don't give real sense of the enormity of the Basilica.
Then, we took a train south to Sorrento, one of the most beautiful places I've ever seen. The city is built right on the cliffs of the Mediterranean. Again, words cannot do it justice, but I have many pictures. On the second day in Sorrento, we took a short train ride to Pompeii. We spent three hours there, and didn't see even half of it. I knew it was a city, but that didn't really sink in until I got there. It's a city. The whole thing. It was like stepping back in time nearly 2,000 years. Sometimes, when I walked the quieter parts of the city (there were thousands of people there) I could almost hear the noise of everyday life as it was in 76 A.D, could almost see the villagers. I wonder who walked down the same road I did, whose house I was walking through. It was a really amazing place.
We then went back to Rome for another day before we flew home. We saw the things we didn't on our first days. One of those sights was the Capuchin Crypt. It's the weirdest thing I've ever seen. A series of tombs decorated with the bones of Capuchin monks. By decorated I mean, there were vertebra arranged in decorative fashions on the ceiling, ribs made intricate patterns on walls, even the lanterns were made completely of bones. Human bones. Weird stuff. Do a Google Image search for it. After that was the loooong flight home. We got in about 11:00 pm on Friday. Having about eighteen hours of sunlight is weird...
And did I mention how much I love flying? Man, I had about as much fun going to and coming from Italy as I did when I was actually there. When you break through the cloud layer, and the sun is shining everywhere, it's beautiful. The cloudscape is the most breathtakingly brilliant thing I saw on the whole trip. My face was glued to the window of the plane. Once again, God shows that He can out do man's best efforts with just some water and dirt.
