golden tickets, ice, zombies, and a whole lot of walking.

Ciao a tutti!

This past week I was actually quite productive in life! :]

On Wednesday I skipped my morning class to go to the papal audience. I went with about 8 other people from AUR. When you go to the papal audience you go into this huge auditorium with at least 500 other people to be blessed by the Pope.

I had the golden ticket! Just like Charlie, except I didn't get any candy!

And let me tell you, the Pope is a frickin rockstar here! The second he came on stage everyone started to scream and cheer. It was almost comical.

Isn't he precious? My favorite is his shoes!

Different bishops came and said a prayer in French, English, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Polish and Italian, and would announce the different groups. The groups would then cheer/scream/sing/play (there was an entire orchestra there)! Then the Pope would say a small prayer in each of the languages as well and bless any relics you had. It ended with singing Our Father in Latin, which we all stumbled through. Afterward, we walked up by St. Peters and got to see the changing of the guard. It was pretty cool.

I desperately want to see them fight in these outfits!

Thursday night Clara, Vivi, and I went to school to watch the Goonies! Afterward we decided to go check out the ice bar in Rome. We got to the ice bar and were literally the only people there, but we had fun nonetheless. Listening to 80s music in our huge silver ponchos in a hallway of ice! Good times! :] Plus we had a coupon so we got 2 free drinks!

Rocking the silver poncho!

Me and Vivi.

Even our glasses were made of ice!

Friday we went to a National Geographic exhibit that's in Rome. It was all about people, and they had a bunch of photos showcasing women, men, children, and people in general. I really enjoyed it! Afterwards it started to downpour so we made some soup and just relaxed for the night.

Saturday we went to the Catacombs of San Sebastiano. Basically it's a tour through underground passages where people used to be buried. Today there are no bones in the catacombs, or at least not in the part of the tour. We had waaay to much fun on this tour! As we were on our way in we started making zombie jokes and that pretty much kept us entertained the entire time.

Entrance to the catacombs.

My favorite moment was when we were in the Necropolis and all the lights went out. Clara, Vivi, Mickey, and me all start laughing and getting excited that the zombies are coming, when our tour guide freaks out and yells, "WHAT IS HAPPENING?." Turns out the lights were on a motion sensor and the zombies weren't attacking! Maybe next time. Although after about a minute longer in that room our tour guide states that "we have no reason to be in this room any longer." I think it was close to zombie feeding time and they just didn't want us to know!

Afterwards we were going to climb the cupola of St. Peter's but there was some sort of convention for municipal workers of Italy so it was completely packed! We ended up walking to Via del Corso and doing some window shopping while also enjoying the street performers.

Really, the Packers in Rome?

After shopping we decided we were all craving a bit of home so we went to the Hard Rock Cafe for hamburgers. They were sooooo delicious, and we got free dessert, but afterwards we all felt like we were going to explode...literally.

Finally, on Sunday we decided to go to Tivoli, Italy. It's a small hillside town about a hour outside of Rome by train. Me, Clara, Vivi, and Tony met up at 9 am and headed out on our adventure. We got into Tivoli around 11 thirty and went to Villa d'Este. The rooms in the house had many frescoes as well as some fountains. What Villa d'Este is really known for though is the gardens. There are over 500 fountains, as well as pools, grottoes, statues, and plenty of plant life. It was absolutely gorgeous! For everyone whose as cool as me and has seen the Lizzie McGuire movie, it's where Paolo and Lizzie go on their date! :)

After the gardens we got some lunch and decided to go to Villa Adriana, or Hadrian's Villa. Earlier we had gotten a map from information, and it showed Villa Adriana to be close to the city center....WRONG. We started walking down a road to where the villa should have been and before long the side walk was gone and we were walking on a windy road down the hill. We were going to turn back, but we ran into some bikers that assured us the villa was down the road. After about 45 minutes, as we were walking through an olive orchard that was next to the road, I looked at the map again and realized that Villa Adriana was 6km from the city center! That would be 3.7 miles away! At this point though we decided to keep on walking and eventually found ourselves in the other part of Tivoli. After a few helpful locals gave us shortcuts we finally made it to Villa Adriana!

We walked all the way from the town on the hillside!

Villa Adriana is where the Roman emperor Hadrian used as a retreat and later actually ruled from in the early 2nd century. The grounds were huge, and some of the ruins were actually very well preserved. I loved being able to see original flooring and columns from 2000 years ago! Crazy! It was very pretty and we walked around for over 2 hours.

Also, as a plus for the weekend, it was International Women's Day, so we got into everything for free! Well, except for poor Tony!

After leaving the villa we were determined to find a bus to take us back up the hill. We walked back to the main road and after about ten minutes of waiting caught one. What took us a hour and fifteen minutes to walk down, took us five minutes to drive up! It was a bit depressing. :) After walking around a bit more we, grabbed a gelato and headed back to the train station.

Dedicated to Steph!

The ticket office was closed and the machine was broken, so we freaked out for about ten minutes before learning that we could buy our tickets back to Rome on the train! Thank goodness!

This week has been really rainy, I'm hoping the weekend will bring nice weather as I'm going to Sperlonga, Pompeii, and doing a graffiti clean up. Needless to say, more pictures will be coming!

ALSO, I just booked a trip to Cairo, Egypt and Budapest, Hungary! I'm soooooooo excited!