92. Venice

Venice was our last stop on our Italy tour.  We were all pretty tired from a train disaster the night before (more about that later), but we managed to find some energy to enjoy the floating city (complete with gelato and gondola ride).

Ambree realized, after we left the hotel, that she kinda looked like a gondolier.  Funny.

This was our train home.  We were SOOOO excited to have bunks.  

I know I've left out a lot of details and explanations, but I just need to get these pictures up.  It really was an amazing trip, and gave me enough stories to be talking about Italy for the rest of my life.  Maybe some day I'll tell some of them to you.

91. Vernazza

I love Italy.  I love the ocean...well technically it is a sea.  It's beautiful.  My life is awesome.

90. Pisa

We went to Pisa.  For 9 minutes.  We would have stayed longer but it was POURING rain, and I was the only one with an umbrella.  The tower is cool.  It's leaning.  

We had to take a few of these:

The thing is, only Jana's worked out really well.  We were all huddled together (under the single umbrella) and I would shout for someone to go stand by the tower.  Everyone put up their hands, but they were always way off, and I couldn't move that much with the camera....so we just got a lot of dorky shots.

This is what everyone looked like after our short (though exciting) excursion out of the Pisa train station:

Soaking wet and freezing cold we continued on to Vernazza, one of the five cities known as the Cinque Terre.  THIS PLACE IS GORGEOUS.  Oh, I would love to live here.

89. Florence

We spent one full day in Florence, and we really got the most out of it.  The Duomo is SOOOO sweet, I couldn't stop staring at it.

This is the fake David.  We also saw the real one.

We all had sunburns from the day before.

87. Vatican

Wednesday in Rome is Pope day, and we were in Rome on a Wednesday!!  We sat out on the hard, sunburnt chairs set out in St. Peter's square and waited for our "audience" with Pope Benedict XVI.  I took a few photos as we sat out in the square with the sun beating on our backs.

Above is St. Peter's--this cathedral is SOOOOOOOO HUGE.  We went inside it later in the day.  You walk inside, and it takes you a minute to register just HOW big it is, but then you start thinking about it, and you realize it is one monster church.  Gorgeous though.  Below is the view behind me, lots of people want to see the pope on pope day.

So then eventually the Pope came out and rode around, on all the paths between sets of chairs.  It was really neat!  There was music playing, everyone was clapping, and the Pope was waving.  We were all standing on our chairs to get a good look.  I got terrible photos, but Krystle got a great one:

Isn't his sunhat so cute?!  I'm not Catholic (obviously) but I still thought it was really cool to see the Pope in real life.  After he drove around he went up to the front of the cathedral and sat down to give his blessing.  Before the blessing a bunch of other people said stuff....and repeated it in five languages...so we decided to go meet back with our group to tour the Vatican Museum (and see the Sistine Chapel).

Our tour was really neat.  We focused on the works of Michaelangelo and what inspired him (you have to focus on something in the museum, otherwise it is just madness).

This statue was one of Michelangelo's fave's.  Or so they say.

The Vatican Museum is just HUGE.  It goes on and on, and has all sorts of amazing things.  I was really glad we had a tour guide though, because I would have gotten lost (and bored) if I hadn't had someone pointing out all the cool stuff.  Oh PS our tour guide was THE CUTEST thing.  We never figured out where she was from, but she was adorable.  She always referred to us as the seven girls.

On our tour of the Vatican Museum we saw Raphael's School of Athens.  I've seen this painting in countless books (including American Heritage), and it was very neat to see the original.  This guy here is my man Euclid.  Love that guy.

You aren't allowed to take pictures in the Sistine Chapel, so I didn't take any of it, but it was incredible.  I cannot believe that it was done by a person laying down getting paint in his eyes.  I recommend seeing it if you ever find yourself in Rome.

86. Pantheon

Our second day in Rome we decided to go to the Pantheon.  We also had our suits on to go to the beach, but then it started raining...story of my summer.

The Pantheon is beautiful.  It was built by the Romans as a temple to their many Gods, but has since been obtained by the Catholic Church (ironic). 

Isn't it gorgeous?

Except for the scaffolding?  ALSO the story of my summer...scaffolding.  It's like Europe thinks it is a good way to decorate the outside of buildings or something.  

The neat thing about Rome is that you can just wander a few blocks (if that) and find something gorgeous and thousands of years old.  Seriously, no matter where you are, you will find something.  You can be driving down the road and you will just see columns left over from a temple or old roman marketplace.  It is crazy.  Below is a church we discovered after wandering around the Pantheon area.

The sun eventually came out and we decided we would try to figure out how to get to the beaches of Rome.  It wasn't TOO complicated, but it was cloudy :(.  That volcano in Iceland has GOT to stop disrupting the weather (that is our hypothesis to why it just keeps raining and raining and raining).

85. Roma

After a rather lengthly blogging break, I am back to posting photos (I'm still shooting for five a day).  However, before that, I have some catching up to do.  Like I said, I went to Italy for 10 days with some of the most wonderful people at BYU.  IT WAS FABULOUS.  Seriously, best summer vacation ever.

Our first stop was Rome.  We took a night train from Vienna to Rome on a Sunday evening.  Let me tell you--a night train does not mean a sleeping train.  We tried all laying down in our compartment, but there were just WAY too many feet in my face, so I went and slept with some strangers.  Once I did that I was able to get some zzz's.

Once we arrived and took care of some logistics and planning stuff, we went to the Colosseum.  It was incredible!  Do you know it took them like seven years to build it?  It is crazy what slave labor accomplished back in those days.

The romans love the trees shown in the photograph below.  They call them pine trees....yeah, I was confused too.  They like them because they can plant a bunch of them together and make a big umbrella of shade.  Italy gets warm--not for us, of course because its just been a freak summer--but usually the shade is quite welcome.  I think they look neat.

We went on an actual tour of the Colosseum and Roman Forum, just so we could understand things a little better (and not be like, "Hey look...some old stuff!!").  It was super interesting.  Below is a church that is standing in the Roman forum.  The six lovely ladies were my travel companions: Krystle, Ambree, Maria, Jana, Kayla, Whitney.

Can you believe that people in Rome just drive past this on their way to work every day??  It is unbelievable to me!

That night we went to the Spanish Steps and the Trevi Fountain (and ate gelato-naturally).  We all threw coins into the water at the same time.  I learned later that you are supposed to throw in TWO coins, one of which is to guarantee your return to Rome someday.  I think I'm just going to make that happen anyway.  I could have spent a lot more time in this city.

It was a perfect first day in Italy.

83. Bratislava

This one time we went to Bratislava to go to an Opera.  We all had a hard time getting into the trip for some reason.  It was warm outside, our tour guide had a really thick accent, and the other people on the tour with us were REALLY old.  Oh, and the Opera.  It was in Italian with Slovakian subtitles: yeah, not helpful.  I did read the synopsis before so I kind of understood what was going on, but I was still confused by a lot of it.  Anyway, some photos:

78. Wandern

77. Salzburg

It rained in Salzburg.  It rained a lot.  All day.  I saw a lot of umbrella, and not so many sights.  But here are a few photos I did get.

This photo was taken up in the Salzburg Fortress.  The fortress is a legitimate medieval castle, like the type a whole village could live in.  It was pretty neat-except for the wind and rain that almost carried us away.

I don't like this photo.  I don't even know what this building is.  But I just wanted to point out the gold ball down at the bottom.  Yeah, that's right, the giant snitch thing.  That was a gift from the Germans just a couple decades ago.  It has this weird man on top of it.  It looks very out of place on the streets of Salzburg.

This is a portion of what used to be a mondo-huge music box.  The scroll at the bottom made the organ play over the whole fortress.  I wish we could have seen it in action.

After Salzburg we went to the tiny ski town of Dorfgastein.  I loved that place, even more than Innsbruck.  Our first morning we went to the town church to attend the holiday mass-Corpus Christi holiday.  It felt like Christmas in there.  Everyone was dressed in traditional Austrian garb and it smelled so good!  The kids that helped with the service were adorable and the choir was beautiful.  Afterwards there was a "procession" through the town-which was just the town band and battalion.  It was interesting to see girls in their green cloaks and blue knee high socks playing the piccolo with a pierced nose and lip.  I think it's cool that the teenagers participate in all the traditional stuff.  I was so glad we were there on the holiday.  

That night the locals were still celebrating the holiday by drinking, dancing, and singing all while this guy played the accordion.  SO FUN.  One of the guys came over to talk to us, and knew that we were the Americans and where we were staying.  The town is that small.