Rome (Day 3 and 4)

This is why I need to write blogs while I’m on trips.  Otherwise the days all run together and I can’t remember much detail or what we did which day. 

I think on Friday we headed out to see the Catacombs of St. Callixtus.  Here are some pictures from on the way there.

The people we were traveling with, Mark’s family.

We took a bus ride on one of the oldest roads in Rome.

The Catacombs are under this field, and many more around it.  The Rome area has over 40 different catacombs that they’ve found.  Unfortunately we couldn’t take any pictures of them inside, but they’re basically an underground network of graves.  They dig tunnels and then dig holes in the walls of the tunnels to put the bodies in.  There are multiple levels of tunnels.  These ones were built after 150AD.

The lane to the catacombs.

We took a guided tour of the catacombs and Abbie did surprisingly well.  I was a little worried about it since she doesn’t do well when she’s confined (in the Ergo) and we stand in one place for very long, but she did well.  We taught her to say catacombs and her version was more like cacacooms, but she’s only 19 months old so what do you expect?  She had fun pointing to all the graves and saying “Cacacooms”.

Abbie absolutely LOVES her uncle Ryan.  She’s still talking about him 3 days later!  Luckily he likes her just as much as she likes him and they have fun together.  If he wanted to come be a live-in nanny for us, that would be perfectly fine with me.  =)

After the catacombs, Mark, Abbie and I headed to the Baths of Caracalla, which were the Roman public baths, built around 215AD.

The whole area is 33 acres and it had one huge building that could hold over 1600 bathers at one time, along with many other smaller buildings.

The ruins of the big building.  Apparently it was more like a rec. center because it had a library, gyms and swimming pool and 3 baths (cold, medium and hot).  They remained in use until the 6th century and were the only site in Rome damaged by a 2009 earthquake.

Inside the ruins of the main building.

On New Year’s Eve, Mark’s parents were nice enough to stay at the apartment with Abbie so we could go see the fireworks.  We got to go on the rooftop of Mark’s brother’s dorm and watch the fireworks being set off all over the city.  It was a neat experience.

View of the Vatican from the rooftop.

Rome (Day 1 and 2)

I was going to try to do just one post with our Rome pictures, but I just uploaded over 950 pictures to my computer and I still have another camera to upload…  So, it looks like this is going to be more than one post.

Wednesday night we didn’t really do much besides get settle and walk around the neighborhood our apartment was in.  This river was about 2 blocks from our apartment.  I had my 50mm lens on my camera since it does really well in low light, and I was just playing around with it, but I liked the way these pictures turned out.

This flower stand was on the corner right near our apartment too.  I liked walking by the flowers every day and Mark bought me a rose one night.

Day two, we headed to the Coliseum.  Within the first 2 minutes of being near it, we had Abbie saying “Coliseum” and pointing to it.

The Coliseum was finished in 80AD and took 8-10 years to build.  It’s considered one of the greatest works of Roman architecture and engineering and it’s the largest elliptical amphitheater built by the Roman’s.  (We’ve seen another one they built in Verona.)

A view of the Roman Forum from the Coliseum.

The friendly Coliseum cat.  He was getting lots of attention.

This was large enough to hold 50,000 spectators back in the day and it’s been ruined by time, earthquakes and stone robbers.

Arch of Constantine.  Built in 312.

Arch of Septimius Severus, built it 203.

These are all pictures from the Forum.  We bought a cool book that has pictures of what exists today, with a page in front of it that showed what it looked like way back when.  I’m not going to go into detail about all of these things because I still don’t know what half of them are and it would take me all day to figure it out.  That being said, it’s pretty neat being among structures that are this old and it’s fun to try to imagine what it would have been like almost 2000 years ago.

Abbie had a grand time running all over the place and climbing over stones.  It’s a little tricky to actually get her to hold your hand at times, but in the Forum we pretty much just let her go and followed her around since there weren’t any streets around and there weren’t tons of people.  It’s too bad she won’t remember any of her adventures in Europe when she gets older.

 

Salzburg’s Christmas market.

This is long overdue…  Sorry about that!

On the way back from Austria (in December) we stopped by Salzburg (the home of Mozart and the Sound of Music).  I only saw a very small portion of it and definitely have plans to visit again, hopefully in the summer, since it’s only 4 hours from us.

Most cities in the Germany/ Austria/ northern Italy area have Christmas markets, and we stopped by Salzburg’s for an hour or two to check it out.  Actually, Salzburg has three Christmas markets, but we only went to one.

Salzburg seems to be a very picturesque place.

Here’s a picture of the Christmas market.  It probably covered at least 2-3 blocks and was really neat to see!

They seemed to sell a little bit of everything.  Here are a few examples:

As I said, I would love to go back to Salzburg when it’s warmer out since I about froze wandering around the market.  I would love to go on the Sound of Music tour and see Mozart’s history, among other things.  It’s definitely on my to-see list!!

Traveled out.

These past 5-6 weeks have been crazy for us.  It feels like we’ve been going non-stop with little room to breathe between our trips.  Needless to say, I’m glad to be home.  I love to travel and see the world, but 4 trips in under 6 weeks is too much, especially with a 19 month old in tow.

We just got back from a week in Rome with Mark’s family.  I’ll post a blog about that later.  Rome is a really neat city, but it seems the further south you go in Italy, the more rude the Italians become.  It’s very obvious that they all just think about themselves only.  I’ve never encountered a more rude group of people in my entire life.  Mark, Abbie and I were trying to get off of a bus.  We were the only 3 people getting off and we were standing at one of 3 sets of doors on the bus.  Normally, in any other country, the natural thing to do is to wait for people to get off of the bus before you start barging on.  Oh, but not in Italy.  There were 2 guys trying to get on, and they each pushed their way on either side of the railing in the middle of the doorway so Mark and I couldn’t get out either side.  Obviously the bus driver wasn’t paying attention because he closed to door and drove 5-6 blocks to the next stop before we could get off and walk back to where we had originally wanted to get off.  As I said, they’re just rude, completely inconsiderate people and it starts to wear on you after a while. 

There seems to be some sort of organized chaos here, especially when it comes to driving.  In Rome, there were many roads that were probably 3 lanes wide, but they didn’t have any lane markings on them.  I guess it makes sense since the Italians don’t pay much attention to them anyway, except to drive directly on them since they can’t make up their mind which lane they want to be in.  So it was normally this herd of cars randomly driving down the road, not even close to being in any sort of lines.  The only semblance of order was that MOST of them were going in the same direction.  And if there did happen to be lines on the road, there were almost always at LEAST two cars side by side in one lane.  Seriously, it’s nuts.  I can’t believe there aren’t more accidents, but I guess they all seem to know what they’re doing, even if I have no clue.

The bathrooms in Italy are odd.  The Italians apparently don’t have a use for toilet seats, they just have the bowl, at best, and sometimes it’s only a hole in the ground.  It’s a good thigh workout every time you want to pee, that’s for sure.

This trip we shared a room with Abbie, and that is not my idea of fun at all.  Abbie is a SUPER restless sleeper and she flops around in bed all night long, moaning and grunting and waking up.  When she’s in her own room, she rolls over and goes back to sleep.  However, when she’s in a room with us, she stands up and starts talking and won’t go back to sleep until you get out of bed and put her back to sleep.  Ugh.  I’m a light sleeper when it comes to Abbie anyway, so any time she’d breathe deeply, I’d wake up, and there were multiple times Mark and I were in bed, holding our breaths, being as quiet and still as we possibly could be in hopes that she wasn’t actually waking up, just rolling around.  It’s not fun and it stresses me out.  Next time we’ll get our own place with 2 bedrooms so we all sleep better.

Abbie was somewhat of a monster on this trip too.  She’s really good at traveling, that part wasn’t the problem, except for a few hours on the way home.  But she is the bossiest 19 month old I’ve ever seen.  She knew she had every one of my in-laws in the palm of her hand and she took FULL advantage of it.  She’s usually a good eater at home, but she wouldn’t eat anything we gave her when we were in Rome, with the exception of goldfish and milk.  We have her going to bed with bottles of water at home, but there she wouldn’t throw a full on fit if we didn’t give her milk and since we were in an apt with 5 other people and normally it was 3am, we just gave it to her.  If you walked out to get milk, as soon as you walked back in she’d be quiet and lay down.  Grr…

Anyway, I’m currently working my way through mounds and mounds of laundry and trying to get the house organized.  I just downloaded the motivated moms app for my iPhone and I think I’ll really like it.  It gives you a list of daily chores and then weekly, bi-weekly or monthly chores every day.  I think this will help me stay on top of my housework a little better.  I also just ordered fabric for my 3rd quilt that I’m pretty excited about.  Fabric is outrageously expensive though, but at least it’s cheaper online than it is here in Italy.

Hope you are having a fantastic beginning to 2011!