Rome - Unorganized beautiful chaos.

In the early hours of December 19, Mom and I headed out into the rain/snow from my apartment in Miranda to begin our journey to Rome. Our route was as follows:

Bus from Miranda de Ebro - Vitoria

Bus from Vitoria - Zaragoza

Bus from Zaragoza bus station - Airport

Plane from Zaragoza - Rome

Our morning went surprisingly well, we caught all of our transportation more or less on time, and arrived safely to Rome. Once there (and on the plane of course) we got our first tastes of Italian, a language that I thought I would love, but instead ended up being a little annoying. I did, however, have a great time with the Italian phrase book I bought about 2 days into our trip, I taught myself to count to 10 or so, and to say some basic expressions. I guess I should have practiced more though before I tried to order Mom a tea for breakfast and ended up saying 'and a tea for him please', whoops.

While touring around for 3 days (most of the time in the rain) We managed to

see a lot of different monuments, ruins, buildings, etc. My favorite part of the trip by far was climbing up the 551 steps to the top of the cupula at the St. Peter´s Basilica. I had been looking forward to it since the second I found out that it was possible to climb up, so when it came to the moment I started up the stairs while Mom got a head start in the elevator. Because of the curved roof, at the top the stairwell was actually curved the same shape, so we had to cilmb sort of leaning sideways a little. At the very top the stairs turned into a super small spiral staircase that had most of the people getting really dizzy by the time they got out into the fresh air. The view from the top was absolutely incredible. I cant even imagine what it would look like on a clear sunny summer day. I find it so exhilerating to conquer something like this and then have such a great reward at the end.

One thing that was really annoying about going and visiting all these awesome places, was that Rome is terribly marked. The streets just as badly as the tourist attractions. The two most confusing places were the Vatican City (the entire thing) and the Coliseum. During our visit at the Vatican City we had a pass to visit the Vatican Museums, St. Peter´s Basilica, and the Sistine Chappel. Our little tour guide man explained how to get from one place to another (since he so kindly left us after about 30 minutes???) but when we got to the deciding point nothing was marked, and this ended up in us walking around for an unneccesary 30 minutes or so. I know that I´m a fairly efficient tourist, so I can just imagine the troubles others had with this. At the Coliseum we had the same problem. When we went in we followed the signs that said ¨Visit Route¨or whatever they said, but once we were up on the second level, we could see the people down on the first level, but could not figure out how to get down there!! After aimlessly walking around bumping into hundreds of people with colorful umbrellas, we finally found our way down there. The Coliseum was truely beautiful, and its really a wonder how they managed to build it without modern day machines, but instead with pure manpower! It´s incredible.

Anyhow, on our last day, we finished our holiday with a disasterous experience in the Rome Fiumicino airport. Again just another completely unorganized way of approaching absolute chaos. Because of the enormous amount of flights flying out of that place (about three departure screens for 2 hours worth of flights) at the boarding gates, three flights appeared on each of the screens, and no annoucements were made to clairify which flight was actually boarding or anything. This together with a really bad lack of seating, resulted in passengers from three seperate flights all making a giant blob of people trying to figure out what was going on. Somehow we ended up leaving (about 2 hours late) and got into Madrid with perfect timing to miss our bus to Miranda. Because there were no more buses to Miranda that day, we decided to just get a ticket to Burgos (1 hour from Miranda) and hope that when we got there there would be a bus leaving to Miranda. Luckily, there was. The last bus for the day was leaving in 40 minutes. In that time Mom and I went down the street and grabbed a nice pastry to hold us over, then we boarded the bus at 8:30. We arrived home to Miranda around 10:30, so tired, and just ready to collapse into bed. And that is exactly what we did!

Conclusion: Great trip, great experience, but painfully chaotic and crazy.

To see pictures go here: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=150759&id=511245247&l=eb4faf090f