PLayer Journal: Days 2-3
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| View from the top of St. Peters Rotunda |
First a little bit of advice for anyone who ever visits Rome. There are people in front of the Coliseum who are dressed as gladiators. They are just so neat and friendly and it’s easy to want to take a picture with them. However, if one of them volunteers to take your picture with the rest so your whole group can be in it, kindly decline! Jessica (Curtis), Brandy (Magee), Tea (Armstrong) and I found this out the hard way. We thought the lady was so nice to volunteer to take our picture, but when she demanded five euros per camera (we each had a picture taken) we found out something different. We paid her 20 euros (foolishly, we know know, but she had our cameras) and walked away knowing we had just been fooled. Oh well! A lesson learned about traveling abroad!
After spending the day mesmerized by the Coliseum and the rest of the Forum, we headed back to the hotel to rest up before our match. We didn’t know what to expect from the opposing team but we were glad to have some good competition. The team fought hard every point, but we also worked hard and eventually claimed the match after four exciting games. We quickly showered up and headed to the bus to ocme back home. Of course, our team was starving so we found a restuarant close to our hotel and ate as much as we could.
We were stuffed from the delicious variety of pastas and pizzas our host ordered for us and headed back to the hotel to retire to bed soon after. However, my room (Bethany Howden, Jenny Andrew, Jessica Curtis and Sarah Holloway) found it hard to fall asleep since there was a fight right outsided of our window. There were even people hanging out of windows in the other hotels on the street taking pictures of it. Miraculously, Jessica did not even flinch with all the noise! Well, I guess I shouldn’t have been that surprised she didn’t wake up considering she has already fallen asleep standing up on this trip (no joke! It must be nice to have that ability!).
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| Jen Christian, Dariam Acevedo and Bethany Howden looking for Hungarians who would take a picture with them. |
The team met at 8:30 this morning for breakfast in the hotel and then took the Metro to the Vatican City. This was definently the site I was looking forward to the most on this part of the trip, and there was no disappointment from me when we arrived. It was absolutely breathtaking! The size of the basillica and its decorations was amazing. We looked around inside and had a great tour by an American art student, but also worked on our next European Apprentice games. We have new teams with Sarah and Jen Christian being the captains. I was on Sarah’s team along with Jenny, Mira and Brandy.
We knew we were in quite a jam when the coaches and staff told us we had to find people from various countries with passports, but of course we knew it would be fun talking to people. We had some fun conversations trying to convice people to pull out their passports and take pictures with us so we could prove we actually met them. Each group was looking for four different countries, and we had to find people who had Japanese, British, Polish and Czech Repulic passports. The other group had to find people from Germany, Hungary, Austria and Spain. The line to get into St. Peter’s was really long when we got there, so it was a great chance to try to find all of our countries.
After we finished seeing the Vatican City, we wandered around that area of Rome a little bit more and we met up with the rest of the team at the Spanish Steps, which was also quite a treat. There was also a lot of great designer shopping right at the base of the steps, so we all took the opportunity to see a little bit of the fashionable side of Rome.
We leave Rome tomorrow and I know it will be hard to depart from such a wonderful city.
