Made it to the beach on the coast, sunburned in only 2 hours, survived the Rome hostel, had an amazing pizza and salad tonight on Musa, the Osburn's friend in Geneva.

We decided to scrap Milan and Como, and took a train trip from 9am to about 9pm today. The first 6 hours were not fun. The train was full, and we didn't have reservations, so we had to trade off sitting in the isle. Tomorrow we'll tour the UN building, hopefully, and then head to visit Udo, son of Francis Schaeffer of L'abri, then on to Robert's place in northeast Switzerland. It's good to be back in the mountains and out of Italy.

If you haven't done so already, visit http://picasaweb.google.com/mrlandby/

Put it on slideshow, and although there are lots of pictures, you can see them all in a fairly quick amount of time. Most of them are good, and there are only a few repeats per album, I promise. And I just finished rotating the ones that needed rotating. Enjoy, they're as recent as yesterday the 9th.

They don't call Rome the Eternal City for nothing. We spent that long in a line for the Vatican Museums today. Once inside, it was sheer madness with as many classical sculptures as people in the most ornate building imaginable, with the exception of St. Peter's dome thingy.

We saw the colluseaum(spelled like nauseaum because that's what it felt like). JK

We had fun. But you can't see it all, now can you!

Go see my pictures at http://picasaweb.google.com/mrlandby

ALL of the deviation pictures are there, up to this point.

That thing is OBSCENE!! (Matt O says 'it was beautiful')

Kapa, Me and Matt O.  Now THIS is beauty.

I am happy to inform all of my readers that things went better our final day in Florence.

We got up, took a shower (avoiding the GOOD MORNING wakeup call) and embarked to the caffe just down the street. The caffe has .80 pasteries and .80 coffee. My breakfast was a 2.40 euros, which is very good by Florence standards. I left with a happy face, a full stomach (for a while) and hyper coffee energy which is the drink of the gods.

Funny anecdote - the hostel locked us in . We went to get an umbrella and yeah. So.

We had an 11.45 reservation for the Uffizi, and until then we just wandered. Matt O got some pizza (one slice for 4 euros) and we bummed around until we went over to get in. We saw Kapa there.

Now Kapa is an interesting fellow. He is from China, but went to school at Edinburgh and got a bachelors in English and a masters in Cultural Studies. Instead of finding a career job, he worked at Starbucks for two years and travelled the world. On the way he found an island in Greece that gives room and board for work at the bookstore. He also told us about Rome, and about the self-service food bar he had found.

The Uffizi was good. It was small, much smaller than I expected, but there were some trenemdously beautiful works of art, especially religious art in there. The famous painting was of course the Venus by Botticelli, which is cool but I found other lesser known paintings to be more... engaging.

Atter the gallery (which we spend much time just sitting in and talking) we wanted to go to the Lorenzo chapel. On the way Matt O saw an ice cream place, and suggested we go inside. We did. Against my better judgement I got an ice cream cone. I gasped when I saw it, and almost had a heart attack when I heard the price. 12 euros. (those of you who know my spending habits know that that was 6 times what I was planning on spending, and enough to feed me for two days). My demeanor was as upset as the ice cream was amazing. Matt, of course, finished his before I had the first scoop started. I couldn't even eat the whole thing.

Distraught, we headed to the chapel and ended up sitting on the steps listening to tourists from Norway or Sweden, watching American tourists and feeding the pigeons. We discussed politics, religion, animal rights, school, and lots of other things while we relaxed. When I got up I felt cleansed, like I had just had a good cry and life would be better. It was.

We bought presents and headed for the place Kapa told us about. We met him there, reading a book he had just bought at a cheap bookstore. We ate supper with him for a decent amount (I had two main dishes) and just talked.

we hung out with Kapa that night, listening to street musicians, walking about, buying ice cream and just enjoying each other in the setting, not trying to see everything under the sun. It was a great night.

So what now? Now we are in Rome, after a relaxing morning with Kapa and a long, unconfortable train ride on a dirty train. The hostel is very cramped and a little less than comfortable, but we already met some nice French girls. Tomorrow we haad for the Vatican. It's ashame we missed the pope's audience today - a German madman jumped onto the popemobile. Oh well, Florence has redeemed itself. We'll see what we can find in Rome.