italy: a quick tour.

rome, day 3: vatican city, papal audience (he looks like darth sidius), sistine chapel (loud but the tour we were on was great), stayed with friends i made in prague. went out to the bar with a kid from california, two from boston, and one from philadelphia i had met less than two hours previous. they were nice. day 4: st. peter's made me glad i'm lutheran... one statue from that place wouldn't fit inside good shepherd (maybe if it was laying down). train to florence. long, long train to florence.

florence: amazing hostel (15 euros a night, hot breakfast delivered to our room every morning), not impressed by the accademia gallery (where David is housed) at all. David is impressive, his museum is worthless. you can't even look at any other paintings because the lighting is so poor that there is always an awful glare on them from any reasonable distance. i was more impressed by the ufizzi, but i was so sick of religious paintings (i wish i had counted the number of "annunciation to mary" paintings i saw in europe). Botticelli rocks - the Birth of Venus is one of my favorites. also in florence, rough roads with the traveling buds, ended up spending parts of two days with the boys of group, which made me nearly homicidal. they literally had an hour long conversation about doing a study on which kind of beggar earns the most money. of course, then you'd have to choose several different locations and probably be each kind of beggar for a week, and another variable would be if you were walking or sitting, and "sometimes business men do this sort of thing for a rush", and all i added was that he'd have to do something to benefit the homeless with the money afterwards. no answer.

venice: LOVED IT. the weather was beautiful, the city is amazing and didn't smell at all bad when were there. i had to concentrate really hard on not getting seasick, but other than the boats it was great. we visited St. Mark's and St. Mark's Square, and tried to visit the cemetery island (from Vivaldi's Ring of Mystery fame (thanks, Dad)), but it was closing as we got there. i navigated our way all around the winding sidewalks and paths and we had a grand ol' time except when the we tried to visit the Biennale Park (home to a biannual (you could have figured that out) contemporary art festival with really interesting buildings for each country that participates), but it cost 8 euro to get in. thwarted by being a poor college student yet again. the last thing we did in venice was ride boat 1 down the Grand Canal with Mackenzie and i narrating the way.

sorry for my erratic use of capitalization in this post. it's 1:33 am here, and i'm going to sleep for a few hours before awaking to cram my head with economic facts. and the correct spelling of Baden-Württemberg. (that's it).