Piazza Navona, Pantheon and Spanish Steps

On the second day of Christmas my true love gave to me...

Oh wait, that's not what I was going for...

On the second day of my trip to Rome (but our first day of the itinerary) we went to:

Campo de Foiri

This was a market that had glass, scarves,  jewelry, souvenirs, meats, cheeses, dried fruits, nuts and veggies of all kinds.  One of the women on the trip offered a book or a tote bag as a gift to each one of us.  I got a book, as I brought along my own trusty bag for the trip.  The bags were purchased at this market and I got the book at the Pantheon later in the day.

The veggies were so interesting.  For the most part, they were all recognizable but some were different colors or larger or smaller than I was used to.  The artichokes were an incredible purple.  We were traveling for the rest of the day on the bus, so I didn't buy anything that needed to be refrigerated, but I did buy a bag of nuts (walnuts, almonds and something else...hmmm, I can't remember what the other one was.  Well anyway, they were very good and they lasted me the whole week) and I bought a small link of hard salami. 

Piazza Navona

Piazza Navona is a very popular square in Rome that boasts three beautiful fountains, many open air cafes and artists showing their paintings, drawings and watercolors. 

On the day that we were there a troupe of players showed up to perform on the stage in the plaza.  We had to leave before they had officially begun, but I did get to see the musicians practicing.

My very favorite thing about Piazza Navona was that these four locals were there.  You could just tell that they were regulars to that bench and that they sat there to catch up with each others lives as well as to witness the world go by. 


Pantheon

From Piazza Navona we walked to the Pantheon.  As we gathered to get our instructions, I noticed this incredible looking shadow on the wall.  I was just giddy with excitement, I couldn't believe my luck to get both an interesting shadow and a little picture of a castle!  I waited until Lori finished giving us our instructions before I took some shots of it.  (but it was difficult to wait!)

Ahead is the Pantheon.  Oh my goodness I was so excited to see this place.  I knew it was a beautiful and unique building but when I walked in I was overwhelmed with how incredible it really was in person.  This was one of my favorite buildings when I studied Roman art and architecture in college.

The ceiling of the entry was pitch black, but thanks to a little photoshop I was able to lighten the shadows so that the interesting details could be seen. 

There was a man standing next to this guest book and he motioned for us to sign.  I was so excited that I took a picture of it :)  Funny thing is that just two or three people after I signed in, the man folded up the book, put it away and closed up the little section.  I think only three of us from our group got to sign in. 

The oculus.   The oculus of the Pantheon is open to the elements and the day before, when we had arrived in Rome and it was snowing, it snowed inside the Pantheon.  When I was looking at the light shining on the dome it was perfectly round, but when I took the picture it doesn't look round.    Maybe I was dreaming or blinded by the bright light but I was surprised when the shadows made the beam of light less than round. 

There are some portions of the Pantheon that are just so gorgeous that it looks like it could be a brand new building and other parts, just feet away, that had seen better days (below.)  I do love to see the fancy ornate bits, but I have to admit, the cracked and plundered parts were so very interesting. 

All around the Pantheon there were little altars and statues.  This was one of my favorites.

After the Pantheon we had lunch and then boarded our bus to take us to the ....



Spanish Steps

Before I even got a chance to see the Spanish Steps I had an accident.  I was walking down the sidewalk with everyone else and as I stepped off the sidewalk at one point, I found myself crumpled on the ground with a dozen faces all looking at me asking me if I was OK.  (My travel mates were so kind!)  I honestly had no idea what happened, but fortunately I scraped up only one knee and landed on my butt.  I didn't fall forward, thankfully.  Had that happened I may have broken my camera and banged up both knees and possibly my hands and arms.  I would have sobbed giant huge tears if my camera would have gotten broken!   Somehow my right foot slipped out from underneath me (the roadway in this spot was wet) and I literally just sat down.  It was a pretty icky wound and it was throbbing pretty good, but I hobbled to a Farmacia (Pharmacy) and got a package of large bandages and some antibiotic cream and got myself cleaned up and bandaged.

I sat here for quite a little while - the Spanish Steps.  I'd heard about these steps, but I had no idea that they'd be so crowded!  It was a great place to people watch.  I really did enjoy it.  Because I wanted to make sure that I got the most out of my trip, I did hobble up to the first balcony.  My knee wasn't too terribly painful yet and I knew it would be a great place to take some photos, so I just took my time and walked up there.  I wanted to go all the way to the top, but I didn't want to push my luck.



Via Condotti

 Standing on that balcony on the Spanish Steps I could see Via Condotti.  That's the street between those two buildings.  This is the street where nearly all of my travelmates had gone window shopping.  It was also the location of the leather store where Lori had made purchases before and recommended the shop to us.   I had planned on going with them to see if maybe there was a leather bag just calling my name, but the fall saved me a few hundred dollars :)  I decided to rest on the steps.

So what's the big deal about this street?  This street is where all of the big names have shops.  Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Prada, etc.  These places are so exclusive that you can't just walk in and browse, I understand that the doors are locked and if you look like a buyer you are allowed in. 

One thing that truly fascinated me was the dress of the Europeans. They were, for the most part, dressed in black from head to toe.    You can tell who the tourists are - they are the ones that are wearing color!  Be sure and click on the pictures to enlarge, because it is truly interesting.  On this particular day I was wearing my black jacket and brown pants, so I nearly fit in.  The rest of the trip I tended to wear my red windbreaker  - it might have been just because  of the photo above.  I felt the need to look like a tourist :)


We continued our journey by boarding the bus and seeing several more locations of interest.  Most of those were drive-bys.  We saw so many places that I don't even have photos for all of them.  It's hard to get good shots on the bus and to also pay attention to what you are seeing.

So that was my second day in Rome.

One of the girls, Karen, got this shot of me.  This was later in the week, but it was cute, so I thought I'd post it.  The self portrait didn't turn out, so it was immediately deleted.  I think I got several chins and half of my face.  Definitely not a keeper!

Oh, it just occurred to me that all of these photos are giant. Goodness, I hope they don't take too long to load. I'll edit them during the daylight hours and make them a bit smaller so they don't take up so much memory to load.

I hope you have a terrific day!
Kristin

confession

I have to take a shower.

I took a shower yesterday, so showering today was not in my plans.

I don't shower every day for many reasons, but the main one is that my skin dries out too much and it's just easier on my poor dry skin to just avoid the shower every other day.

I don't like getting wet, so that's another reason why I choose not to shower each day.

My towels are all dirty (they are in the wash right now, so I guess they are nearly clean) so I can't take a shower right now, but I need to.

back to the reason why I have to shower.

I think I may need to get a haircut, too.

For breakfast I had yogurt with Kashi and walnuts.  I was eating it while editing photos, like I do most mornings.  Then about an hour after breakfast I went to put my hair behind my ears when I realized I had a blob of yogurt and kashi in my hair!  sheesh.

You'd think I had a small child.

Then for lunch I made a very messy sandwich with a very flavorful and juicy tomato. During one of my last bites the juice from the tomato literally shot into my hair and dripped all the way down.

I'm going to toss the towels into the dryer and then jump in the shower.

I just can't avoid it.

At least I thought it was funny!

Kristin

Savannah, GA

While I was whooping it up in Rome my husband sent me an email asking if I'd like to go to Savannah with him.  He was going to be going to the boat show while he was there, but thought it might be nice for us to have a little mini vacation together.  I thought I might be in the mood for a weekend away just 5 days after I got back from Rome, so I said, SURE!

We left on Friday morning.  I assumed (wrongly) that we were going to drive to Savannah.

 A photo from later in the trip  :)

What I mean is that I thought we were going to just drive to Savannah and not make a bunch of stops along the way.  Well, I was very wrong.  The 140 mile drive took us six and a half hours. Thankfully, I brought along my Kindle and some water.  I didn't mind that he called on clients along the way, it just wasn't what I had initially expected.  All in all, it was a nice drive.


We ate at a really nice seafood place in Darien, GA.  Tom is hoping that they will advertise in the Waterway Guide, but in some ways I think he just likes to eat at Skippers Fish Camp.  I'd have to agree, it was so good!

Across the street from that restaurant was this lovely place.

It looks like it would make a great halloween venue - or even a great halloween card.  Tom loves to talk realestate, so he inquired about this building and found out that it's for sale for about 1.5 million.  I'm sure it's priced for the location and not for the structure.  Wow.

Eventually we did make it to our hotel - the Marriott on the river.

The inside was pretty cool - this was the atrium and there was a pool inside the atrium as well - so the whole place had sort of that chlorine pool smell.  Not strong, but just enough to alert you to the presence of the pool.  Since it was quite chilly this weekend in Savannah, the pool was a very welcomed treat for some, I'm sure.

In our room the little shelf that held the complimentary soaps and such was very masculine.  I mean the whole thing was masculine - the brown and tan colors against the wood grain backing of the shelf unit - it was very nice, but not girly in any way.  I thought it was interesting.

We walked down on River Street and found a wonderful place to eat.  The next day, Saturday, I spent the day alone and I managed to take over 200 photos.  I guess I'll have to hurry up and talk about this weekend and then get back to Rome as soon as possible.

More on Savannah later.
Have a great week!
Kristin

Hot Chocolate

One night in Rome a few of my friends and I went to the boat restaurant for dinner.  We were so cold and wet from a very rainy day in the city that sitting down in the familiar restaurant was all we wanted - that and some warm beverages.

The rest of the girls ordered some sort of coffee drink, but I don't like coffee so I ordered hot chocolate. 

I was so excited when it arrived because it looked like it was just two sips.  Perfect, that's all I needed. 

However, upon further investigation the tiny cup contained chocolate.  Hot, boiling, chocolate. 

It was literally a cup of hot chocolate.

It was too funny!

I showed the girls and we all laughed.  The menu did say hot chocolate, but obviously I didn't understand. 

The Italians knew what it was, didn't they?  I just can't figure out what they do with a cup of boiling chocolate.

Well, I asked our waiter for a cup of milk if possible - hot.  We discussed the amount of milk and he walked away shaking his head.  I was obviously totally deranged. 

He came back with about three ounces of milk to go with the same amount of chocolate in my tiny cup.  I poured in the milk and it completely filled the cup.  I stirred gently and the waiter just watched with his head tipped to the side - wondering if I had truly lost my mind. 

When I thinned out the chocolate it was a very delicious three sips of hot chocolate. 

The funny thing is that nearly everything that we got in Rome that was supposed to be hot was lukewarm.  The pasta and pizzas - warmish,  sandwiches that should be cold were lukewarm and all cold beverages were lukewarm.  We just got used to it.  However, the hottest thing I had the entire week was that shot of boiling chocolate. 

When I retold this story when we got back to our apartment I was asked if I got a photo.  I said no.  Why?  Because it was a cup with black in it.  There was no other color but black!  Maybe I should have taken the photo to remind me of the story, but at the time it didn't even look like chocolate.

So today is just a story...you'll have to visualize the hot chocolate :)

Be warm.
Kristin

One of those weeks

Have you ever had one of those weeks where your life just sort of gets away from ya?

I got home on Saturday night from Rome.  By the time I actually got to bed, it was 7am Rome time.  I had been awake and traveling for about 26 hours.  So this meant that Sunday was pretty much a wash for having anything productive happening.    Tom and I actually went to Whole Foods together, but he had already been to the regular grocery store earlier in the day, so this trip was just filler.  We got mostly cheese and bacon :)  I was so tired that I think I just wandered and smiled :)

I unpacked, talked with my tenants, snuggled with the kitty, took a nap and watched the Opening Ceremonies of the Olympics.  I DVRd the prime time coverage of the Olympics because it was just killing me that I was missing it, but I really couldn't complain too much - I was in ROME!  and that folks, was great.

 So that was Sunday and today is Thursday.

What happened to the week??

I have been on the computer a lot.  An awful lot actually.  I've been editing my photos from the trip and that seems to be taking a million hours.  I have the Olympics on in the background, too.

I took a ton of pictures and I want to show them all to you. 

How interested are you in seeing 1533 photos?

LOL

I didn't think so.  That's a lot of crooked pictures.

Here's just a sampling of what I've gotten edited so far.

I had to edit out the crookedness.  I swear, all of my photos are tilted about 2 or 3 degrees.  

Enjoy!

This was the street where were were staying.  At one end of the street was the Coliseum and at this end was this rounded building, which was a church.

I think this is part of  St. Paul Outside the Walls..  Love the row upon row of columns.

One of the churches that we visited had all of these little white heart confetti pieces all over the parking lot.  It was Valentines Day, but I think the hearts were for a wedding.

Candles were seen in nearly all of the churches we visited. 

...but some of the churches only had these electric ones. 

Pyramid Cestius - Wikipedia info "The pyramid was built about 18 BC–12 BC as a tomb for Gaius Cestius Epulo, a magistrate and member of one of the four great religious corporations at Rome. It is of brick-faced concrete covered with slabs of white marble standing on a travertine foundation, measuring 100 Roman feet (29.6 m) square at the base and standing 125 Roman feet (37 m) high."

We drove by this on the bus, as it really isn't a touring kind of pyramid.  It's sort of stuck in the middle of a wall now.  

This is just an interesting section of one of the large doors of a church.

This is part of the church that had the heart confetti in the parking lot.  This gate/door is just gorgeous!  We all got out picture taken next to it :)  But once again, the photo of me is on someone elses camera. 

You can see how big this door is - Ann was one of my travel-mates.  She's from Boston and I kept asking her to say "Leather" so I could have a laugh!  She says "Letha" tee-hee!

Be sure and click on this photo to enlarge it.  The pieces of glass are tied with a thick cording and hang like a strand of Christmas lights.  It was truly unique.

Just some candy at a cash register.

This is believed to be the original manger that was used by baby Jesus.  It took me a few minutes to find the wooden manger under all of the glass and gold, but it's there.

This was a cute sign inside of a department store that we visited.

Ahhh, the Sexy Shop! 

I saw this as we were driving by on the bus.

Interesting bit of detail in an outside parking area.

We went to this very interesting overlook of the city. There was a war memorial there and maybe a hundred of these busts of men who were instrumental in the Italian military.  This guy reminded me a bit of Colonel Sanders, so I thought it might be interesting to get his profile looking over the city.

The sign above (in the B/W photo) said that the Holy Stairs may only be climbed on ones knees.

I love a row a snowglobes. :)

and I'll end with a photo of me standing next to the River Tiber.  I had someone take this with my camera so I'd be sure to have one photo at least!

The red windbreaker was my signature piece.  I wore black the first day but on the second day when I wore the red jacket in the rain, it was just determined by the group that I was much easier to keep track of when I was in red.  Not sure why I needed to be kept in line, but I went with it :)  I usually wore my black jacket under this, so it worked out well. I was warm and visible.

Have a great weekend folks! 

Kristin

Google funny!

My husband came home this evening and I was watching one of the taped Olympic programs that I made while I was gone. It was the Men's Moguls. My husband said, "Do you remember when Moguls became an Olympic Sport?"

I said, "Well, I remember that it just all of a sudden appeared, but I don't know when."

So I did what I always do - I Googled it.

This is what I got... (you can click to enlarge)

Oh, I hooted and hollered at that one!!

Too funny!

I did find out that the Moguls became a part of the Olympic Games in 1992.

I'm glad he asked, I hadn't had such a good laugh in days.

Have a great day!
Kristin

Smashed Euros

What happens when you take a single Euro coin and a two cent Euro and put them into a machine? Why you get a smashed coin of course!

Before I left for Rome, I went to the Penny Collector site that I use and found that there are many international cities that have coin smashing machines.  I was determined to find a machine once I arrived in Rome since it looked like there were so many.  

Fortunately, I was able to find two separate machines! This one was at a souvenir shop right across the street from the Colosseum.  It had four options, but I only had two - 2¢ coins so I chose to get the Colosseum and the Wolf image. 

According to Roman legend, mythological twins,  Romulus and Remus were given nourishment by a wolf when their mother was imprisoned by the King.  Later, Romulus named the city of Rome after himself and killed his brother when he made a mockery of his efforts to protect his new city.  Romulus then became the King of Rome.

The image of the wolf feeding the twins is seen throughout the city.

This machine was at a souvenir shop near the Vatican.  The 2¢ piece above shows St. Peter's Bascillica and the coin below is of Papa Benedicto (Pope Benedict.)

I really like getting smashed pennies as my main souvenir because they are inexpensive, easy to carry and are fun to make. 

I brought the pennies home and put them in my book with the other smashed pennies that I have collected and of course, blogged about my good fortune!

I have missed being here each day.  I hope that the past two weeks have been as good to you as they were for me :) 

Kristin

just photos around Roma part 2

There are eight of us staying in one large apartment here in Rome.  Another nine live in four other apartments in the same building.  The final two live two doors down.  Most nights we have gone out to dinner at the nearby restaurants in small groups of four - six, but on this particular night almost everyone came to the patio in the large apartment and we had a picnic of sorts.  This is nearing the end of our dinner feast, but everyone wanted a picture of the destruction.   We had bread, grapes, cheese, cheese, cheese, salami, wine, more bread and more wine.

It was so much fun.  

I don't have my notes in front of me, but I think this is the interior of a church called St. Paul Outside the Wall.    It's a Papal church and it's outside the original ancient walls of the city of Rome - hence its name. 

During one of our bus tours I spotted this scene outside the windows.  It's not an uncommon site, but I hadn't seen the laundry hanging underneath the shutters before, so this was fairly unusual.

This is a detail from a gate in a church that kept the masses from going into certain sections of the church. 

Beautiful scroll work.

This was a meringue dessert at one of the many restaurants we visited.  Those little coated candies were a popular item in the pastry shops.

A statue of Mary holding baby Jesus is in the background of this beautiful gate.

One of my favorite pictures of the trip of the girls.  I came up to this beautiful lookout and I saw all four of them holding their cameras like this!  I laughed so hard that they put their cameras down, but I made them pose it again because it was just too funny.

My flight home is tomorrow.  It's an all day event.  10 hours in the plane from Rome to Philly, then a flight to Charlotte before I get to catch the next flight to Jacksonville.

More Rome stories when I return!!

Kristin

just photos around Roma

The Pope giving his blessing on Sunday after Mass. 

One of the girls standing in the light coming from a stained glass window across the church.

This last photo is all of us, taken by the bus driver.  The woman in front who I said looks like she's doing a Stevie Wonder act, is Aunt Jean, and she really just didn't smile for us - oh well.  She's such a hoot.

Having a great time - seeing the Pope today for a special event at the Vatican for Ash Wednesday.  Gotta run - miss you all so much.
Kristin