As you probably could have guessed, we’ve been hiking all over Rome non-stop for days now and haven’t had much of a chance to update the blog, but rest assured that we’ll keep on top of it henceforth.  How have we been busy you might ask?  Well let me explain.

 

Two days ago we covered the many major hills of Rome, as described in the previous post.

Yesterday we had our papal audience and almost too much time to explore on our own.

A papal audience you say?  Did we personally meet Pope Francis and talk with him?  No, not exactly, unless you count being 24 within a couple thousand a personal experience.  That’s right.  It was a literal sea of people.

 

It took place inside their designated Pope-cosmodrome and had separate segments for people who wanted to pay least, more, and probably a section for donors (so the really high rollers).  Prior to the event, we were told to go for the aisle seats so we would have a chance to shake his hand if he came walking through, so we planned to arrive about two hours early.  When we arrived, you know what seats were taken?  Every aisle seat and the twenty next to them.  Of course.  We decided we could make do with other seats, so we headed as comfortably close to the front as we could.  An hour and a half of sitting goes by and then to our surprise, a circus comes onto stage.

 

Yeah, I’m not kidding.  I know if I didn’t have pictures to back this up none of you would believe me but it’s true.  Clowns, acrobats, what looked like a barbershop quartet, it had it all.  They performed their individual acts for around 20 minutes and then departed.  It turns out that they were part of a circus that was trying to imitate Cirque du Soleil.  It was a decent attempt at being weird, but Cirque du Soleil did it first, just saying.  Not long afterwards the large tv screen at the front lit up with live video of the pope headed into the front of the building we were in, and as soon as people saw it, they mobbed the aisle.  That wouldn’t have been a big deal but the people began to get up on their seats for better views and so everyone behind them could see nothing until the pope had reached the stage and even that took quite a while.  It took around 10 minutes to travel the approximate length of a football field since he kept shaking hands, holding babies, and at one point he took a drink of something from a fan (not sure if he actually did but I’m sure that cup now has its own pedestal at the guy’s house).

When he was up there, he greeted everyone and went through a speech in Italian and then every individual translator (there were about 6) got up, translated the speech, and then rotated back to their seat.  Following that routine was another, shorter speech where the pope blessed everyone in the room and their families, which had to be translated 6 more times.  Some of you may be doing the math right now, figuring out that yes, the vast majority of the time was translation of the same thing, over and over and over.  Still, it was pretty neato.  After the speeches, the circus came out to perform for the pope.  It all seemed like a king and his jesters at that moment, but with less certainty of death upon failure.  Once they had jested to completion, the pope gave yet another short speech, but it wasn’t translated since it was a completely spontaneous speech.  I believe the jist of it was it’s good to have fun and be weird if I’m not mistaken.

 

Anyways, the next time our group had to meet to do anything was in around 6 hours, so we all split off to do separate activities.  The group I ended up with went southwest on an exploration journey that totaled about 8 miles if my calculations were correct.  We ended up heading south along the Tiber, going all over what I shall dub “west bank,” taking a journey all around the Vittorio Emanuel and cat sanctuary (yes, it’s actually a sanctuary for cats), and then heading back to the hotel via the Pantheon.  Quite a full day, but that wasn’t the end of it.

After a break since our feet were about ready to fall off, our entire class had a meal in a small restaurant called the Piacere Molise just a block away from the hotel.  We had appetizers galore, a pasta sampler, wine, and tiramasu.  The general consensus was utter satisfaction.  And finally, the day was over.

Keep watch for the next update coming soon!

 

– Chris Apfeld