Italy part 1 - Rome

I promised to keep you up to date on my adventures and I finally have found the time since getting back from Italy to update you on my trip! But first I'll give a little background information...

I went for study abroad so the format and activities on the trip were much different than what I would have planned had I gotten to choose anything we did during the day. There were 20 people in our group and we left bright and early January 1st.

It got off to quite a rough start - Delta moved up our flight time so three people missed the plane and had to meet up with us later in Rome and soon found out that in all the confusion Delta had lost their bags. However, second day clothes and all the show had to go on!

Tired and jet lagged from our journey we mustered up the energy to do a 5 hour walking tour of Rome. Here are some pictures from that first day in Rome starting from the airport ride back through our first day.

We all zonked out pretty early that night but only to rise again at dawn to start a full day (literally 8 hours) walking/bus tour of all the major spots in Rome. We went to the Vatican museums and all the other important Vatican sites, the Colosseum, the Roman Ruins, and finished with a museum.

It was a beautiful day with bright blue skies and sunshine. I appologize for some of the photo quality as we were on the run most of the way through the Vatican Museums and so my camera didn't get a chance to focus. The rest of them I think are pretty decent for all being taken on an iPhone, but you can be the judge.

I would just like to point out the fact that this hallway above is especially fascinating because that isn't carved my friends. The ceiling is flat and that is all painted.

This is after the Sistine Chapel. It was amazing but we couldn't take pictures. Plus we were rushed because the Pope decided he wanted the chapel for himself at 11 and it was 10:40 when we got in there.

To give you a scale of how enormous St. Peter's was - those letters you see towards the dome in the picture above are over 6 feet tall and the ledge above them is so large that a bus could drive on there.

After that we made our way to lunch which was at a tiny self-serve which makes it odd that of the whole trip my food was one of the stand out meals of the trip. We also did a little souvenir shopping before moving onto the coliseum, the roman ruins, and finishing at a museum for the day.

I have gone through my pictures already and will be posting my trip in a series of 4 parts. This is the first obviously and don't even think these are all the pictures I have! I just chose a few that I felt represented the places we visited best and decided to show them.

Talk to you guys next post!

xo