Friday Chaos

Let me preface this by saying that while I did in fact go out on the Art History field trip to the Vatican on Friday, we didn't really see much (for reasons I'll get into below), so I'm saving my Vatican pictures for when I have better ones, which should happen this weekend with friends. The rest of the weekend (which will be in a separate post, to prevent an even more exhaustingly long post than normal) was more interesting anyway.

First, a brief explanation about Art History here at the Centro--I'm not in the class, but they have field trips every Friday and generally anyone is allowed to tag along if they get permission beforehand. Naturally, as this was the trip to the Vatican, just about everyone wanted to go.

Unfortunately, things didn't go quite as planned. Actually, scratch that--just about everything that could go wrong did. We all showed up at the Vatican at about 9:30...only to find that the professor for the class was not very far ahead of us in the line. We ended up waiting an hour in the line, and then found that there was a dearth of tickets...apparently some of the people that joined us hadn't remembered to check with the professor ahead of time. So the students who hadn't asked were supposed to get tickets and then hopefully get Franco (the program director) to reimburse them. Thankfully, I had asked...but then I got stuck in a long bathroom line, and by the time I caught up with everyone, they were on the other side of the ticket check, and someone had taken my ticket. So I had to go buy a ticket from the counter, and honestly I was a little pissed. Franco says we'll get reimbursed though, so I'm waiting on that.

One thing I had failed to take into account was that since the class is on Renaissance and Baroque art history, there was going to be lots of paintings of Jesus and Mary and various saints, which I'm pretty apathetic about at the best of times. Also, since I don't take the class, I wasn't aware that the professor tends to cover things in exhaustive detail--which is good, he definitely knows his stuff--but it means that we visited a grand total of five works in two and a half hours. I was looking forward to his lecture in the Sistine Chapel at the end, so I didn't just wander off to explore the rest of the Vatican myself. As it turned out, we never got to the Sistine Chapel as a group--the lecture was supposed to end at 1:00, because we all had to eat and be back at the Centro at 2:15 to go the American Academy of Rome to get our library passes. I'm not sure that the professor understood that we really did have to be back by then...so he suggested that we tag along while he went to the Sistine Chapel and lectured briefly at sites along the way. I (and some others) understood by this point that "brief" was not something he appeared to be capable of, so we decided we would head out on our own. Our mistake was deciding that we'd swing by the Sistine on our own way out, since we'd all come to see it anyway.

As it turns out, it's basically impossible to get through the Vatican museum quickly, and even more impossible to get through to the Sistine quickly. There are entirely too many people in the museum at one time, and like many museums, it's designed to essentially force you to see everything before they let you get out. We did eventually get to see it...and then had to go through more mazelike halls to try to find an exit, since we were starting to be pressed for time. We eventually made it out, found our way back to the bus stop, and waited for the bus that would hopefully get us back to the Centro in the twenty minutes we had left. Five minutes passed...then ten...still no bus. Finally a bus showed up (not the one we wanted, but one that we thought would work), and we hopped on just to be doing something like attempting to get there on time. The bus did actually get us to the San Pietro train station, where we hopped on a train for one stop to get back to the street the Centro was on...which was then another ten minute walk back to the Centro proper.

We finally made it back to the Centro at about 2:30...only to be met outside by one of the other students who had gone on the trip and made it back late, who told us that we had to go to the Academy now, so we headed off without even a chance for a bathroom and water break (and I really wanted to change to shorts, since the day had heated up quite a bit). Now, none of us knew very well where the Academy was, since we'd briefly seen it the first class day, but we were fairly sure we could find it, since it's quite close. I'm sure you can see where this is going.

If you guessed "becoming horrendously lost and even more late" then give yourself a cookie. When we finally reached the Academy (and a snippy doorman who informed us that we were supposed to be there half an hour ago--yes, thank you, we know) I was about ready to pass out from heat exhaustion, and we were naturally the last group there despite being the first group to (attempt to) leave the Vatican. We got through our (thankfully shortened) tour at about 3:40, and headed back to the Centro. Normally, other than irritating the (otherwise) very nice people at the Academy, all of this wouldn't have been a problem and we could have all just gone back to the Centro to rest and enjoy a lazy weekend. However, our little group was part of a slightly larger group that had other plans that included getting on a train to Naples at 4:45, and none of us had packed yet. So we all raced back, threw a few things into whatever we could carry, grabbed our bag dinners (and lunches from earlier, since none of us had had a chance to eat yet), and rushed frantically out the door at about 4:10 to catch a bus to the main Termini station.

The rest of this story more properly belongs in a post about the weekend as a whole, so you can all read that once I get a chance to rest my fingers a bit (this was not supposed to be this long!) and get the photos together. But if you really think that we caught our train out...well, I've got a bridge to sell you ;)