intjonathan | I survived the vatican

What a killer day. We call at 7:30 to drag ourselves to the metro station, which is not as clean as London but generally pretty similar.

Unlike the Tube, all the underground stations looked pretty much the same.

Stand in line for 30 minutes, and walk into the lovely vatican museum. Now, yesterday we encountered some of the 47,000 euroscouts in town for Jamboree. They mobbed the forum like bratty ants. We did the vatican on a Wednesday, which is the day the pope does an address. These 47,000 scouts had an audience with the pope, which turned out to be a very mixed blessing.

No more "way out"

The lovely vatican museum, which is the art history portion of the trip, was actually quite empty. We spent at least 30 minutes in the Sistine Chapel, and got right next to some of the museum's most famous works with the whole group. It's really an incredible collection, and earns its place in history easily. Little was in scaffolding, and only one room on the tour was closed. The Sistine and the Raphael Room had both been cleaned recently, and popped with clarity and those lovely renaissance colors.

This was in the Pope's office. It's just one of the wall-covering frescoes by Raphael. It's also much bigger than you'd expect.

Vicki spent 5 years studying the Sistine ceiling, so it was wonderful to have a complete expert on the symbolism and history. She generally knows her stuff about everything on the tour, but the depth at the Sistine was truly remarkable. What a place! Even looking at postcards afterwards, you see these iconic images so differently after you've seen them in person.

It's really, REALLY hard to get good pictures in the Sistine. See if you can find God's butt!

The flipside of having the museum to ourselves was having to share St. Peter's with 40,000 scouts. It was worse than any concert I've ever attended. Lines, lines lines. They aren't accustomed to hosting tens of thousands on a Wednesday at St. Peter's, so the security line was 30 minutes long just to get into the 90,000-capacity basilica. Once inside, it's so big that even a stadium feels small, so that wasn't bad.

When we went back out to climb the cupola, however, things got ugly. I and 4 others split from the group to relieve ourselves, but when we tried to join the group again, discovered that we'd exited a security checkpoint. Once you enter the secure zone at St. Peters, you better not have to pee. So we had to go all the way back to the security line, go through that, then get in line for the cupola. We had figured we could find our group, but no way. The line was full-width, all the way from the front of the basilica porch to the outside center. We waited for 90 minutes. There was one guy selling tickets to all us thousands.

Now, to their credit, Vicki said that in 15 years of visiting, she'd never seen crowds this bad. So I can understand them being a little unprepared. Tell that to my poor feet, though. What a nightmare. After all that waiting, it was almost a relief to climb 320 stairs up the cupola. What actually was a relief was the view, which was supreme.

Yes, THAT view.

Miraculously, Vicki and some others were waiting for us back in the basilica when we came down. We wanted nothing but to pee, eat, and cool off, in any order convenient. We caught a bus back and got our wishes. I took a dip in the tiny pool, had a shower, then Justin and I picked up a couple big pizzas for 10 euro each.

Nothing like a big pizza and a bottle of Chianti to ease such a long day. I'm dehydrated, exhausted, my feet are killing me, but tomorrow we're meeting at 9 to take a Met.Ro train to Ostia. There we'll see some Roman theater ruins and then... the beach. A black sand beach, to be exact, where we'll float in the Medeterranian, eat leftover pizza and fresh cheese, and generally not stand around and look at art. I can't wait.