I signed up for
this optional excursion and now I know why it was optional.
Imagine all the
people heading to Disneyland all trying to get into the same ride at one time
and even though there might be lovely things to see why you wait in that line,
there is no air conditioning and no breathing room.
The Sistine
Chapel and the museum were lovely but the experience to see them was
horrible. We left the hotel around 8am
and had to wait in line to get inside the museum. The lines looked long outside but that wasn’t
to be unexpected. We finally got inside
and the guide took us to a beautiful courtyard but then spent a long time
talking about what we would see inside the Sistine Chapel out in the middle of
it where there was no shade. (Sun and me don’t work…so not a great start to the
tour.) I ended up standing in the 4
inches of shade that were cast from the sign that told about the Sistine Chapel. I think I sweated off my sunscreen in the
first few minutes of that part of the tour.
There were tour groups sitting in the shade off to the side listening to
their tour guide and I wanted to join them instead…but they appeared to be tours
in Chinese and Korean…too bad I don’t speak either of those languages.
We finally get
inside of the museum and have to follow the maze of rooms to get the Sistine
Chapel. I can understand that they want
us to appreciate the art but we were so packed into each room that it was hot
and miserable (for me at least…maybe some people like that type of thing.) Seriously, if someone were to faint, they
wouldn’t even be able to hit the floor because it was too crowded. They’d probably just be pushed along with the
masses. Guards in some rooms would tell
us to keep moving which basically meant that we kept trying to switch weight
from side to side to look like we were trying to move except we really couldn’t
because there was no place to go. So
essentially we looked like we were all swaying back and forth to non-existent
music. I was apparently not the only one
that got worried about some sort of disaster occurring while stuck in the
middle of the museum maze.
So, for a goal
of seeing the Sistine Chapel, we didn’t get in there until 11am and only had 15
minutes to spend there. Of course, it was also packed. A parent had allowed their kids to sit down
on the floor in there and I almost tripped over him since, once again, the area
was packed with people. I wish I could
have enjoyed the master piece that it was but by that time, 3 hot, crowded
hours of waiting to see it left me wanting to get into somewhere where I wasn’t
packed like a sardine.
St. Peter’s
Basilica was huge and gorgeous. There
were a lot of people in it but there was plenty of room to still enjoy it. Perhaps most people just took off after the
Sistine Chapel experience and didn’t even try to see anything else. One cool thing I hadn’t expected is that on
the floor of the Basilica was the lengths of other large Cathedrals so you could
understand the large scale of the building.
We only had 20
minutes in a nearby gift shop which wasn’t enough time to do much. I bought some pens, stamps and
postcards. I wrote quickly but only
mailed a couple due to time and realizing that I hadn’t updated my address
book. While writing at the approved
station for that purpose in the store (in a small alcove), a family came up on
one side of me but their teenage daughter went on the other side of me. I would have moved over but was not give a
chance. They were pretty loud and
somehow the man had written a lot very quickly.
I mailed my postcards and took my stuff with me but when I got outside,
the pens were not in my bag. I went back
and asked the people who bagged things up if they still had them but they
didn’t and I showed them the pens weren’t in the bag. One of them retraced my steps with me to the
alcove and saw they weren’t there. He
let me have replacement pens. Now
whether they hadn’t really given them to me or whether the teenage daughter of
that loud family took them, I don’t know.
At first I was convinced they hadn’t put them in my bag but now I think
I was targeted by that family. Since I
had left all valuable things in the safe and had spent my money for the day on
the pens, stamps and postcards, the pens were the most valuable things I had
with me. Quite frankly, even if it was
the girl who took them, I would have hopes that the shop would have done more
to try to prevent things like that from happening there. Side note: (Assuming that it was the teen
girl that took my pens) It was so hot that my chocolate-covered granola bar had
melted inside my small travel bag. It
would have been interesting if she had stuck her hand in it instead of the
small bag of purchases. (Bag is cleaned
out now, in case you’re wondering.) Still, I’m not completely what actually
happened.
No comments:
Post a Comment