Fairyland was never like this....

The first day in Rome was a Sunday, so like good Franciscan students we woke up rediculously early and headed off to "claim seats" in St. Peter's for mass. Really what they meant by claiming seats was wandering around the church for a couple hours waiting for the 2 masses before ours to be finished, then making a mad dash for the seats cutting off as many old Polish and Italian woman as we could. I would just like to take a moment right now and say that I love how the queue system in Europe works. They don't actually make lines, they make clumps. This is very handy for people who are looking to somehow get ahead. All you have to do is assimilate yourself to the clump and be one of the more aggressive in the clump, and the next thing you know, you're in the front! This is nicht so gut for the unsuspecting American who is used to standing in line with order, the first to come are the first in line, and they remain that way. The only problems that I have had with moving up in European lines was when I came upon a group of Americans. Once they realize that you speak the same language as them they will not be passed. This happened in the line for the Vatican museum, I was considering switching into the small amount of German that I knew, but unfortunatly they heard us speaking english, and we were forced to stay behind them.

Anyway, for mass we clumped together and got some seats. Mass was in latin and not Italian as advertised, which was good for me, and the boy here who I went to high school with, but probably not much help to anyone else. There was also this choir singing from somewhere in the states and they sang Palestrina's Missa Brevis, which does happen to be my favorite mass. Ah yes, the Vatican has been good to me. Speaking of that choir, we went to a concert of theirs the night before, and it took me at least 10 minutes to figure out why the director's name which was "Gregory Glenn" seemed so familiar to me. After mass there was more standing around and looking at things until noon. At that time the Pope came out to his little window and said the Angelus with everyone. Let me see if I can give a good description of the events at this time. Outside in the square there were tons of people, and some of those people were behind me coming from the church and they could not see, so they pushed. It was a very interesting experience. Now I have been in big pushing lines of Italians before, exhibit A: Standing in line to see JPII laying in state - and this was nothing like that. We were packed together with absolutly nowhere to go, and yet they still pushed. My absolute favorite part was when they all realized there was a fence in the way and they really didn't have anywhere to go, and they all started jumping the fence. It cleared up the area a lot, and suddenly I could see the pope and take some good pictures of him. After that I went with some people down these little tiny streets in Rome where we found this nice little cheap restaurant with real Italian food. I can't spell any of the names of Italian food and I'm not going to try, so you're just going to have to take my word for it that it was good. After that we met up with the entire huge group of people at the Colloseum and went on a little tour of some churches where we got to see things like St. Peter's chains and part of the crib of Jesus; things like that. Oh, a quick story about the Colloseum...on the first night I already mentioned that we went to a concert by that choir, well the concert was at a church by the Colloseum. So, we hopped onto the metro and changed from the red line to the blue line at Termini just like usual, and hopped off the blue line at the stop Colloseo. I knew the Colloseum was going to be somewhere around the stop Colloseo, but I never expected it to be right in front of us as we stepped out the doors. Anyway it was very exciting and we did a lot of cheering and smiling etc. Anyway that was basically the end of the first day and well all ran back to the hotel as fast as we could for more good Italian dinner!