Spontaneous Trip to Europe? YES PLEASE!: July 20th: Where My Nunions At??

Our second day in Rome started out much more calculated than the first as we are getting much better at being tourists. We already had an excursion/tour booked for the Vatican City. Yes. We came very very early because of a fabled “bus strike” that was supposed to begin at 8 AM (we kinda think this was false info).

What to do until our tour started at 12? Jennifer’s answer: “SHOP”. My reaction: “Oh no”. :p

Nothing was open yet so we sat on a park bench and people watched. We noticed that there were a large amount of nuns walking around downtown. This might be one of those “you had to be there” stories but we began going back and forth with non existent words using the word nun. We came up with “the nunery” and “nuntastic”. We also threw around “nunagins” and “shenunigans”. But our favorite was “nunions”. Want me to use it in a sentence? OK good. To set it up: if you were a nun in search of your nun cronies you would ask, “Where my nunions at?!” Sorry you asked? OK cool. But now if you hear us using that word you will at least have a frame of reference.

And then the shopping began.

I patiently waited and gave my expert opinion on dresses as Jen looked for a bargain in Rome. She had to find one that covered both her shoulders and her knees because women aren’t allowed to show such things in the church. This was not easy. As many of the spots had no mirror, I took pictures of her on my phone and then showed her what she looked like. This was hilarious because it is obvious by the face she is making in each picture whether or not this was “the dress”. We eventually found a dress she approved of for really cheap and headed to our tour. Dress shopping wasn’t so bad really, but I gave her a hard time about it to keep myself entertained. Snicker. She is actually a very efficient shopper.

Our tour began with the same tour guide we had the day before (Mark Anthony from Ohio, not the singer.) Mark proved to be a mountain of knowledge. He knew everything about everything inside and was really good about sharing the important details and not EVERY detail. According to our homie Mark, if you spent 30 seconds looking at every piece of artwork in the Vatican, it would take you seven and a half YEARS to take the full tour. (Mark hasn’t done it, but the amount of history he spouted out about every single thing we came to made it seem like he did.) To make this entry more realistic, I will summarize: The art and history inside the Vatican is infinitely impressive. Sculptures, paintings, and statues from legends such as Raphael, Donatello, and Michaelangelo. (Yep, they are all Ninja Turtles. I really enjoyed that. Except that as far as artists go, Raphael was my favorite. Michaelangelo was my favorite ninja turtle. Moving on.) The amount of detail and the near perfection of each piece kept our eyes glued during the entire 3 hour tour.

The tour ended with the Sistine Chapel, painted almost entirely by Michaelangelo himself over a period of four years. We learned he lost his eyesight and ruined his back doing this piece. He also fired almost his entire crew to do it himself. The room was way too crowded. People inched in to marvel at one of the most famous pieces of art in the world. It was pretty amazing.

After the tour our feet were screaming at us and we stopped for a fairly forgettable dinner. We then stumbled upon two dresses that looked like they were designed for Jen and bought them. (Funny because it took us 5 minutes to find 2 dresses when we weren’t really looking for one.) We caught the train back to “il coloseo” in hopes of buying a painting of our favorite monument in Rome. We found one each and got a pretty good price for both. We then rushed back to the train to make our allotted 100 minutes of travel time from our ticket. We stopped on the way to fill up our water bottles with delicious free water that always flows from fountains in Rome. (The water ended up not being free because we missed our ticket time by 1 minute. Wah wa wahhhhh.) Laughing at ourselves instead of being annoyed, we bought another ticket each and headed back to the outskirts of Rome. Home sweet Rome.

Raphael's painting depicting the growth of knowledge during his time. It includes famous mathematicians, philosophers, and he snuck himself in there too.

The square outside the Vatican! This is where the pope comes out and makes papel addresses to all his nunions.

Hallways lined with sculptures of all sorts of strange and beautiful things.

The architecture was immaculate through out the ENTIRE tour.

This is such a great picture.

This is where Jen's dress picking pictures begin. Take note of her facial expression in each dress. They are a dead give away of her feelings about them. I thought this was really funny.