Rome 3 and arriving in Sicily

You know, I was mentally prepared for a lot of things before coming here. The langauge barrier, the weird Monopoly-esque money, coffee strong enough to make your hair fall out. What I wasn't prepared for, however, was this keyboard. It's close enough so I can still touch type pretty well when it comes to words, but punctuation and symbols are all off. They've made space for the accented vowels (à,è,ò,ù) and other letters not commonly found in the English language, and things have moved around as a result. I'll post a picture of it later so you can see what I'm talking about.

So I spent my last day in Rome touring the Vatican. The amount of art they've got there is amazing, and our tour guide said that, after walking for around four hours, we'd only seen about thirty percent or so of what there is to see. I believe him. The Vatican museum is a complex and winding series of halls, tunnels and courtyards, and I'm glad we had a guide to keep us from getting too lost.

I took a lot of pictures of the Vatican, but I'm sort of disappointed with them. They were really restrictive about what they'd let us take pictures of. The Sistene Chapel, for example, was off-limits for photographs, and the guards (regular, not Swiss) were extremely attentive. The pictures I did take are okay, but a lot of them came out less than crystal clear, due to the lack of flash.

For now, you can look at the Facebook albums by using these public links: Rome 1 Rome 2

After the Vatican, we went and got lunch and walked back across the river to check out the Castel Sant'Angelo. Originally the tomb of the Roman emperor Hadrian, it was later used as a castle and fortress, and now serves as a museum displaying Roman and Egyptian art. The art is all very, very cool. I enjoyed it more than most of the art in the Vatican, and the building is really impressive as well. By far the best part of Castel Sant'Angelo, however, is the breathtaking view available from the top of the building. You can see all of Rome, and it's worth the walk up the seemingly endless stairs and ramps. Those pictures, as well as the ones from the Vatican, are in the second album.

Our last full day in Rome over, we had dinner and went back to the hotel to repack. The next morning, we got up and got on the bus to the airport. The flight was only an hour or an hour and a half long, and was significantly more enjoyable than the first one. We touched down in Catania around three or so and piled into a taxi van to Siracusa.

My first night here was, erm... an adventure, and will take a bit more time to describe than I have time to type right now. Suffice to say that Ortiga (the island I'm staying on) is a beautiful place, and I can tell I'm really going to enjoy my time here.