Crawling through Catacombs

We went to the catacombs today! It was awesome. I had left my hat and sunglasses in the lobby of our hotel, so it was really nice to begin our day underground, and being there got us out of the heat and into the cold cold ground, YES!!! The tour guide brought up a really cool insight into early Christianity I had never known before. It is known that the early Christians held some of their meetings and ceremonies in these catacombs, but one of these was the celebration of death (stay with me). Apparently the families of a deceased person would remember the date of their loved one's death and celebrate it, not as the anniversary of their death but rather as their birthday and anniversary of their entrance into heaven.

We ended up in the Circus Maximus where we decided to have a little bit of fun and race around the track. We got some awesome pictures including one with me holding a stick with a huge caterpillar crawling along. In retrospect the race was a bad idea. I forgot to stretch and ended up with really tight muscles and sweating through my clothes. Fortunately it was a really nice day with a cool breeze blowing :).

After this we went back to the things we had skipped over in the forum for the sake of time, and because the tour-guide told us to. This time we actually got to go into the Curia, the Senate House. Marshall and Pam had been to Rome about four times each and neither of them had been there when the Curia was opened to the public. (Warning, nerd moment) Places like this where really famous people like Cicero and Augustus gave famous speeches and made important proclamations are really exciting for me.

All this time I had been without my hat and sunglasses, and since I am paranoid about being sunburned, I was loading up on sunscreen fully expecting it not to work and being unable to move tomorrow. But I survived!

Tonight is the European Soccer Finals between Manchester United and Barcelona here in Rome. We had seen a lot of crazy fans throughout the day chanting and singing team songs, and we were all planing on going out to be in the crowd of 20,000 fans standing outside of the stadium. We completely disregarded the danger of soccer riots, since 20,000 drunk soccer fans can be quite rowdy, but I think we were all sobered by the story the bus driver told us. Apparently a few years back an American was stabbed because he was mistaken for a Brit. I decided to watch the game on the TV in my hotel room. Hopefully there won't be too much going down tonight but was saw the Militare roll in earlier today just in case.

Arrivederci