Day 46

Tuesday September 11

7:45am - woke up to my phone alarm

8:30amish - had breakfast and went to the metro

9:00am - took it a couple stops to Piramide, then took essentially the Commuter Rail to Ostia Antica. Took about 40 minutes all told. Then a bit of a walk to the ruins. Ostia Antica, now 4km from the water, used to be right on the beach. A whole town that they uncovered. Costs 6.50 to get in but I used my RomaPass. Excellent. So this place is pretty neat. So you get to walk all through it, the necropolis, baths, temples, capitol, huge theater, even an ancient ancient synagogue. Cool! So unlike some of the other ruins because it's a whole town, you can try to imagine all these things. Even some of the mosaic floors are still there and you can just walk through it all, down the streets, into the theatre, etc. Spent a good couple hours wandering around. Met Alice, who was born in the US but grew up in Taiwan and is now studying in Wales, she's also traveling alone, we wandered around together and ate lunch in the place's cafeteria, which was a tad overpriced, but it was there lol. I bought a cheesy but cool book where you have a picture of the ruins and then an overlay of what they think it looked like. And I also bought the guide to the Ostia Antica ruins so I could read more about it and see the details later as it was hot and I am a bit "ruined-out" at this point ;) It was still really cool though and such an easy trip from the center of Rome. Well worth half a day and I didn't even come close to seeing everything that was there.

1:00pmish - caught the train then the metro back to Rome, stayed on the metro til the train station and switched to the A line to go out to the Vatican museums. I figure, people say, Tuesdays and afternoons are best. So maybe I'd be able to get right in or without too long a wait. That was the only way I was going to bother to go in, that's for sure LOL

2:15pm - made it to the Vatican entrance…and… walked right in. Wowie. Too easy LOL. Costs 13 euros and no credit cards. There goes the extra Euros I had LOL!! Anyway, lots of statues, which were cool because they were so old and well-preserved, unlike the stuff in the ruins themselves. But the main sight that everyone wants to see is the Sistine Chapel of course. So they make you wind through most of the rest of the museum, which isn't bad, even for art "haters" like myself, you get to walk through a bunch of rooms Raphael painted, lots of cool statues, etc. I just want to say once and for all: TOUR GROUPS ARE THE BANE OF MY TRAVELING EXISTENCE. Seriously, museums should open either earlier or later and force all the tour groups to go in during those times so that those of us who actually want to see stuff and move through the museum at our own pace can do that the rest of the time. And with these "whisper boxes" where the guide talks into a little microphone and the people on the tour all have little earpieces, they just wander aimlessly and PAY NO ATTENTION TO ANYTHING AROUND THEM AS IF THEY OWN THE MUSEUM GRRRRR.

But finally you get to the chapel. For some reason I thought it was round and that you just had to walk around it in a circle. But it's not, it's a normal chapel-shaped thing and you can go all through it. It wasn't nearly as busy as I had thought it would be and I even managed to get a place to sit down and really look around. They had 2 guards AND a loudspeaker say that no pictures were allowed. Why would people be so obvious to attempt with a flash. In fact, even though pictures were allowed in the rest of the museum, NO FLASH. People are just such IDIOTS. Anyway, I snuck a few pictures just sitting there. No flash. I was very well-behaved the whole trip, so I don't feel so badly ;)

3:45pm - left the museum and bought a really nice guide about the museums and the vatican as a whole. Came back to the hotel and went into the supermarket right there and got a couple things to take on the plane to eat tomorrow. Came back to the hotel and dropped all the stuff off and asked about this transportation strike I heard about for tomorrow. In Italy, when there is a strike, they announce it freaking in advance LOL. So tomorrow all the buses and metro stuff is not running between 8:30-12:30. Of course, right when I need to get to the airport. So they confirmed this and I'll just take a cab. Again there go the extra euros as it will be probably 10 euros instead of the 1 euro that a bus ride costs LOL. Ah well. Hahaha. So they will reserve a cab for me here at the hotel, which is nice because cabs will be hard to get during a public transport strike! At least the trains to the airport are serviced by a different company so they will run. And the lady at my hotel told me I could get my ticket for that from the travel agency up the street with no extra fee. So I did that, 11 euros. That's as much as the one in London, geez. Plus it only runs once every half hour! In pretty much every other city they just run them all the time. Oh well. What can ya do. I'm gonna go to the airport super early anyway so I should be fine but still. Craziness.

5:00pm - went to the internet café for about 45min. Tried to look up the info about the strike, but of course it's all in Italian. And the google translation was unintelligible (shocker).

6:00pm - came back to the hotel for a few before going out to dinner.

6:30pmish - hiked up to Via Nazionale and picked up a bus that went right near Piazza Navona, bus #70 if I recall.

7:10pm - went through the piazza and found Da Francesco's again - this time didn't get lost. It was open, hooray!!! Got a table outside this time on this cute little teeny piazza del Fico. I was right in between two Americans - a couple from Madison WI and a mother and daughter from, of all places, Fall River, MA. LOL! Their accents were terrible LOL Anyway, but they were really nice. They were on a group tour and this was a free time for them because they didn't want to see the opera. Everything they said just reaffirmed why I didn't want to take a tour. They didn't even know how to get back to their hotel or even what street it was on! I gave them my bus map because I wasn't going to need it anymore. They were in awe of the fact I researched and did it all myself but I explained to them it was really not that hard and that with hopping on and off buses and subways all day I really felt like a local hopping all across town and that I never had to worry because I could figure out a way back. I got the feeling that if they ever came back, they'd do it themselves lol. Anyway I had another incredible pizza margherita and a little thing of white wine and a plate of olives from their antipasti bar. Total was 13 euros plus a little tip. So cheap and sooooo good. So after we were done they wanted to show me this gelato place - it ended up being right near the pantheon and right near the place I went to the other night that had 100 flavors or something and was sooooo good - this place was good but not as good as that one, but still, good enough LOL. Then I showed them how to read the stops at the bus station and all that stuff lol

9:15pm - got off the bus 64 at piazza venezia and made it to the hotel. And now I have to pack :'( :'( :'(

So, this is the last real blog entry. Thanks for reading, those who did! I'll post some wrapups and stuff, for those few who care LOL