Day 6 - January 30th 2009 Rome, Italy

So the next few blog posts are going to be shorter than previous ones because frankly I haven’t been keeping up with my journaling and cannot remember every minute detail about each day...(not like you wanted to hear them anyway :-P). So today we went back to the LdM school to turn over our documents for our Permesso di Soggiorno, or permit to stay in Italy for an extended period of time. The went smoothly enough. I signed up for the Italian club at LdM so I will be doing a few more Italiano things with the fabulous director Davide Garzia. We took a quick walking tour of the area around the school and Via XX Settembre, checking out spots we get discounts. Then our group went back to the discount pizza shop to grab a bite. I had to jet out of lunch early to go pick up my visitor from Firenze Katie! We went back to the hotel Katie was staying at, dropped her stuff off and grabbed a bus over to the Castel Sant’Angelo to get a in depth tour of the magnificent Papal stronghold. There seem to be a lot of sponsored exhibits in the Castel, which ruined it’s supposed antiquity a smidgen. They had laser light shows inside stone rooms for goodness sake! Oh well the view from the top was fantastic and there was an ice skating rink on the Tiber below so that was a nice touch. From the Castel we wandered towards Piazza S. Pietro and entered the holy ground that is St. Peter’s. Inside is always amazing and having been in twice before I got to look at pieces more closely that I had not done before. St. Peter’s was great and after our guided tour ended and we made our way to Piazza di Spagna to check out the stores on Via del Corso. This shopping excursion was much more successful than the last and the Mastercard took a solid beating. I made my way out of David Hamilton with a black giacca, a few cravatte, and shiny black spat shoes. We cruised back to Katie’s hotel to relax before dinner. We met the crew at Pizzeria Monte Carlo which most of us have fallen slightly in love with for their epic-ly thin crust pizza and tasty cheap red wine. After being kindly asked to leave as we had overstayed by about 2 1/2 hrs we processed forth to the jazz club JazzCafe for a evening of smooth jazz and even smoother dessert vino. We called it a night after the jazz and headed back to base for military issue 8 hours rest.