I already miss you Rome.

We had to start a little early today, because we had Vatican Musuem reservations at 930, but it was a B&B type hostel, so they made us breakfast around 8:45.  It was like toast, cereal, milk, coffee, and juice.  I really just had the cereal, and a bite of the toast, and was antsy to drop our bags off, and get on the subway to St. Peters.  The walk to the museum entrance had a huge line for the people without tickets, but we got through no problems at the reserved tickets line.  At the ticket booth, we only had 3 student ids, but the dude pointed out my AS roma shirt and gave me a thumbs up and let us go through.  We started with the Pinacoteca since it was closed at the night door, and it was definitely one of the main reasons I wanted to come back to Rome, and it didn't disappoint.

 Raphael's Transfiguration is a 13 foot tall masterpiece.

 Leonardo's St. Jerome in the Wilderness had a huge German class in front of it, so we really couldn't get a good view of it, but its another neat unfinished Leonardo painting.  That dude is a lazy ass like that guy Michelangelo.

Then we saw one of the highlights of the trip, the Entombment of Christ by Caravaggio.  This is one of my favorite paintings, so seeing it in person was awe inspiring. This lady next to us giving a private tour to some elderly couple, remarked herself that it was her favorite item in the whole museum.  Just the realism and everything about the painting is remarkable.  So remarkable that some street fashion brand that Kanye West wears, slapped the image on a blank Champion branded hoodie, and charges 400 bucks for it.

After this we went to Cortile della Pigna which we skipped last time, and saw the lame Sphere within Sphere statue that apparently is also at UC Berkeley.

From there we were going to go to the Braccio Nuovo so I could finally see the Augustus of Prima Porta, something I was waiting to see for 2 years, only for that part of the museum to be closed.  So I still haven't seen this sculpture I so desperately want to see, but whatever.  We then had one more stop to make, the Etrustcan/Greek antiquity room so I could see the famous pot of Ajax and Achilles, before we sped through the rest of the museum to get to the Sistine Chapel for our showdown with No Photo guy.

However, No Photo guy wasn't working, and some other tourist laughed when we were saying Silence Please, No Photos.  But we did sneak some videos, and some pictures of the roof of the Sistine chapel. And then some guard stalked my friends and made them put their phones/cameras in their pocket.  I couldn't sneak an image of any of the side paintings which stinks, and its impossible to get one of the Last Judgment with the guards standing right in front of it.  But it was great seeing this stuff again, since I probably won't go to the Vatican again when I go to Rome, unless the Braccio Nuovo is open.

After this, I emphasize that we followed Jeremy out the wrong exit of Sistine Chapel, instead of ending up right outside by St. Peters Basilica.  So we had to go through the long maze of the Vatican museum gift shops that puts you out where you started, a long ways from St. Peters.

 Jeremy and Julian stopped at some gelato place, and David and I walked to St. Peters square only to find a ginormous line for the general public to get inside St. Peters.  With the time constraint we were under, we had no time, so I was annoyed that I didn't get to go inside St. Peters Basilica at all on this vacation.  Again, an excuse to come back to Rome. haha.

We did some Rome gift shopping near the Piazza, before we hailed a cab back to Termini. Our taxi driver showed us a good restaurant to get Porchetta, but we had no time, and tried really hard to get us to go with him to the airport.  But we had to get our luggage, and he had a small taxi.  So we rushed to get our luggage, and get on the train express to Fiumicino airport.  It's really cool that you can take public transport from the main train station to the airport, too bad LA sucks.  From there, we were lost on what stand to go to at Alitalia, but eventually found it, before we had to wait in a huge line for security at the terminal. It was a pain to take out every electronic item I had on me.  But I got some McDonalds, and got my old reliable meal, before we boarded our flight out of there.