Our Italian Vacation Part 2

We also visited the Vatican and the Vatican museum, St. Peter's Cathedral, Sistine Chapel, etc. One of the really cool things about St. Peter's Cathedral is the size. There are marks on the floor showing where other cathedrals in the world would fit inside it. We visited a cathedral in Washington DC and we thought it was huge, it fit a little less than half way inside of St. Peter's.

Here is an image from the door towards the altar.

To give a better perspective of the size. The picture below is on one of the columns along the main isle in the picture above. The Chief is standing at the foot of the column giving a reference to the size of the lowest statue... the baby in the statue is 6 feet tall.

On our way into the Vatican museum, there is a mandatory bag check for bags above a certain size. I think the size is arbitrary as I had to check my backpack but I saw other backpacks of similar size being carried... not that I'm complaining, there were a lot of stairs to climb to get to the top of the cathedral. Anyway, next to the bag check was this sign:

Whatever you do, don't take off your clothes and expect them to hold them while you streak. It's not gonna happen.

One of the nice things about being on a vacation like this, especially when you are visiting on a Saturday, is that there are not too many people there visiting with you. I give you this example:

At some point near the beginning of the tour of the Vatican Museum, we found the hall of miscellaneous statue parts... the only reason there are no people there is because it is roped off and nobody can walk down that hall.

Later that evening we were exiting the subway and found that there is definitely some discrimination against the French.

The English go one way, the French go another, and the universal sign for "exit" (smaller in green and white) follows the English. I'm not going to go the French way, we had a bad experience with a very smelly French woman when we visited Paris. I don't want to find out if it spilled over into Italy.

I also mentioned that my boss stayed in Rome with us for the weekend. She left in the early afternoon on Sunday to catch her flight to her next fun workfilled destination. So the Chief and I decided to look in some shops and see if there was anything we could not live without. About the only thing we could not live without was some gelato. I got some and the Chief got her own. It was pretty hot and it was melting pretty quickly. The difference between hers and mine was she got whipped topping on hers. I tasted it and the topping was not very good. I suggested she scrape it off into a trash can and concentrate on the gelato beneath. Here is what actually happened:

She swears it was an accident and that she stumbled on the sidewalk cracks.

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