It's time to do me!: I missed the Pope!

February 27, 2011

This morning I woke up, not too happy to get ready for today’s events. I mean, breakfast was great and exactly the same as yesterday’s, but today the plans are to go to the Borghese Museum…a place that nobody really knows what’s so special about it. Obviously we know it’s going to be an art museum, but if nobody knows what it is, can it really be that great? AND since we’re going to be at the museum basically all morning I’m not going to be able to stand in the Piazza outside of the Pope’s window as he blesses over the people of Rome! That’s all I was hoping to be able to do while in Rome!!!

But off we went to the bus stop with our tour guide for the museum whose name was Richard Bowen. We had to wait quite a while for the bus and the first bus that came was too full that we couldn’t even budge two people onto it, so we all SQUEEZED onto the second bus, and it was the same experience all over again like we had on the bus from the train station on Friday…not pleasant! Once off the bus we had to walk a little while (past a Hard Rock Café!) before we ended up walking along this pretty little park path (which reminded me a lot of Giardini Pubblici in Cortona) which led to the Borghese.

Once inside the museum we had to check our bags at the desk and had to get hooked up to headsets to be able to get the explanation of the objects in the museum from Richard. However, the headsets ended up being pointless because Richard would whisper into his microphone which was way too far down on his jacket and nobody could hear a single thing he was saying; it was more annoying straining your ears to hear, than just not knowing what the artwork was. But the Borghese ended up being a museum filled with paintings and sculptures, and like ¾ of them were images of women and their breasts…not really my interest in art. But our guide would talk on and on about the women and their chests and after a while, honestly I was slightly disgusted by his explanations and checked the time constantly hoping we would be able to leave…and believe me, I wasn’t the only one.

I shouldn’t completely bash the museum though, because there were a couple sculptures that I was really intrigued by. In Roman Achievement we learned about the man Aeneas who journeyed to Rome from Troy after the Trojan War, and there was the famous sculpture of Aeneas carrying his father on his back who is holding the House of the Gods, and his son trailing along behind. There was also this sculpture of a woman turning into a tree with a man passionately holding onto her…the sculpture was BEAUTIFUL! I wish I would have been able to take a picture of this sculpture, but we weren’t even allowed to bring our bags into the museum, so we definitely couldn’t take pictures in the museum. I also wish I would have been able to take a picture in the museum of Chris next to this sculpture that looked exactly like him! We asked Chris if he had Roman descendants, and he himself was so intrigued by how much he looked like the sculpture that he said he wanted to look up his heritage.

I finally became time for us to leave and we all instantly woke up and ran to get outside, even though it was drizzling. We made our way back to the bus stop and we had to wait for the bus for at least 20 minutes. Once again we packed onto the bus like sardines and got dropped off near our hotel which left us enough time to pick up some lunch and have a couple hours left in the city to explore before we had to leave. Marissa and I broke away from the group who decided to go to a restaurant for lunch, because we both only wanted a little sandwich or something to eat, and didn’t feel like spending much money. Right around the corner from our hotel we found this sandwich shop where all of their paninis were huge, looked great, and were only 2.50. I ended up getting this sandwich that had egg, spinach, and cheese on it, and the woman pressed it to heat it up a little bit…pretty much the best sandwich I have had since I have been here! The sandwich was really filling, but we decided that since our lunch was so cheap we could spring for a little gelato, so we headed back near the famous and delicious coffee shop.

We went into the gelato shop Blue Ice where there are a thousand flavors, and where Tessa got her gelato the other night. I was so so excited to see that they had like 6 soy flavors and ended up getting a cone with soy chocolate, soy cappuccino, and soy nocciola (hazelnut)…the cone was HUGE and cheap and DELICIOUS! I have never had soy taste so good in my life, especially soy chocolate! Soy chocolate is normally really gross no matter what form it’s in. Marissa ended up getting a Nutella-filled crepe which ended up being a big mess because there was so much Nutella that it was spilling out everywhere and made the crepe like impossible to eat. We took our sweets to the Pantheon because since it was raining we thought it would be really sweet to see the rain fall through the hole in the roof! However, once we got there we realized we couldn’t take food inside, and from standing underneath the overhang you couldn’t really see it. And then once we finished our sweets the rain had practically stopped…oh well, it was worth the effort!

We had to meet in front of the boys’ hotel at 3:45, so we went back to our hotel to just wait a little while, and eventually grab our stuff and then head over that way. Once everyone was at Hotel Navona we started walking to the bus stop, but let me tell you the rain was definitely not on our side today. It started sprinkling on our walk to the stop and while we were standing waiting for the bus it started to really come down, and of course nobody had umbrellas, so all of us girls wrapped our scarves around our heads like old grandmas. Thankfully this would be our last unpleasant, super-packed bus ride…maybe even the MOST packed bus ride out of the whole weekend…to finally arrive at the train station! We had about 30-45 minutes of free time before we had to get on the train for departure, so I walked around the bookstore inside of the train station for a little while. Their children’s section of books was really cute and I debated buying a small chapter book in Italian for myself to read. One cool thing I found in the bookstore though, was the Harry Potter series in Italian!

Eventually it became time to board the train, and everyone was ready to sit down and pass out! Once seated I realized I was in the mood for a little bit of munchies and remembered I had peanut butter! I didn’t have anything to eat the peanut butter with, so I just used my finger and ended up cutting the inside of my index finger because I was trying so hard to scrape down into the jar that the jar bit back and cut me…I think this is an indicator of how badly and sad it is that I miss peanut butter. All of a sudden I realized we were back in Florence, so I must have taken a really good nap. We all rushed off the bus, said “Grazie Mille” to Petra, and ran home into our beds. Tonight everyone was going to sleep really well!