i was kicked by a greek hobo

i am supposed to be cleaning my room/ workin on my bod right now. but i'd rather sit here, be emo and type blog entries all day. so here it is

rome was awesome. as soon as we got there i took the metro to st. peter's basicica to st peters square. important. st peters square is actually st peters ellipse, so don't be fooled/extremely disappointed when you travel all the way to rome and not be able to find corners. then i walked across the Tiber (hey mesopotamia unit in 4th grade) to the Trevi fountain and Spanish Steps. I must say, i was a little disappointed with the steps, they are just steps, but dont worry, they grew on my exponentially, they are great for sitting on and looking good.

lookin good on those steps

the trevi fountain was super watery and neat with all those statues spewing water everywhere. i dug it a whole lot. we took a million pictures in front of that and then went to meet courtney and her friends for dinner. we found a place for 12, wait 10 euros (because we were smelly college students) and got wine and salad and pasta and it was great! i really havent seen a vegetable since 2010, when i last saw Sand my mom, and she provided nice vegetables right in front of my face on my plate at dinner.

this is me throwing a coin into the fountain, lookin trendy

then we walked home. people may doubt that rome is walkable, but to broke backpacking college kids, any city can be tackled via dirty tennis shoes. the next day we hit the Colosseum and i made my poor friends take about a million pictures of me in front with my terrible towel. gotta rep that yinzer pride.

here is me, the terrible towel, and the colisseum

we are taking a picture in front of some ruin, love ruins

after contemplating what it'd be like to be slaughtered alive by lions, gladiator men wearing minimal clothing, etc, we went to the pantheon! let me tell you i love backpacking as much as the next person, but after 2.5 solid weeks of sightseeing, monuments start to blend together. the parthenon was cool though, especially because im reading angels and demons. i do want you to know it is the worlds largest unreinforced, (holy smokes!) concrete dome.

we then went back to our hostel and the english majors journaled about life while i ran around all over packing and not journaling. witte has noticed that i can't sit still really ever, and every time we go to a train station, airport, ferry dock, etc i have to go explore the area while she is forced to man the luggage. i think this further proves my little theory that i have undiagnosed add ( and maybe a flair for the dramatic). my mom still never will let me get tested all because i had 4.0 in hs, where is my 4.0 now? out the window with the adderall i dont have.

so anyway they contemplated the meaning of life while i just sat there. then we had pizza and wine so that was delicious.

friday we had one goal: the sistine chapel, so we went and it was all nice and we got shhhed alot by the shhhhers, whose life passion and occupation is to crush joyful comments of Sistine Chapel first timers. Michaelangelo painted the whole thing and 

a. who has that much time?

b. who knew he wasn't just a ninja turtle

painting by day and fighting bad guys by night must have left little michaelA with no time to contemplate life

this is the famous painting thing but it was illegal to take pcitures and all the shhshers were shhhing me so sorry that it is blurry i was nervous

stairs in vatican

Courtney and I went to the Steelers bar afterwards. amazing. definitely one of the best days of life, and i kept being like, this is the best day of my life.

and look at these

my favorite is this terrible towel wrapped around jesus. my other favorite thing is my friend alex asked me if i put the terrible towel around the jesus. yes, alex, i stood on a chair, hijacked the jesus and placed my yellow towel around it. and get kicked out of my favorite bar in the world? do you know how important jesus's are to roman people? there is a high probability id spend the night in jail. no i did not do that.

anyway, the guy is not evern from pittsburgh, but whatever he was super duper for existing. and his bar existing too.

also an ad just came on for will and kate, is there job to walkround from place to place kissing babies and receiving flowers? because i can do that.

i also got rosary beads blessed by the pope! wow. impulse by though, let me tell you. as soon as i wen tto st peters elliptical square i saw this guy with rosary beads and i knew i had to get some for my gig, my grandma, she'll die, not literally, she's going to outlive me the rate things are going, but she be real happy. and it was on my checklist of abroad things to do. travel the world. check. rosary beads for my gram. check. i wanted to do some rosary bead exploring before i bought some, wooden or metal, jesus or no jesus. but this guy was like , "this is the only day you can get them blessed by the pope" ( he comes out on wednesdays and blesses the people) so i had to get them (although i doubt the pope is like "and i bless you and you and the rosary bead guy at the back", but whatevs, mission accomplished)

then we went to greece

and now were here.

i think the world doesn't want me to like athens. we got to our hostel and our greek man told us all the acropolis/parthenony/reasons for going to athens/ stuff closed at 2 and since we got there at 1:30, we were out of time. as i explored all i really saw was alot of garbage and stray dogs, pretty wild. but i know they just went through some bad economic times, so i'll come back one day athens, and i expect you to get your shit together.

we went to bed and then in the middle of the night i thought we were gonna be attached because someone kept coming to our floor. and no one was staying on our floor. and when its like 3am you always think your gonna be taken by bad guys, like that is their "stealing kids time" or something, but no worries, we weren't attacked, and me taking out my one orange earplug (i lost 2 in florence) was pointless.

the nest day we hiked up the acropolis. we hiked up to the top and saw some old Zeus buildings and stuff and the parthenon, everyone knows the parthenon! (not really) and when we got to the top we saw this building that looked like the parthenon that a wrecking ball had hit, and we could see this other really parthenony buildling was way below us. the is the time where you think, "i wish i bought a guidebook because the dumbest question i could ask at the parthenon is 'is this the parthenon'", well good news, it was, some southern lady from upstate new york told us. also why can't upstate newyorkers just be like "im from albany" or say the location for petes sake. is there somethin goin on in upstate new york that no one can say that?

after we got back we grabbed our bags and went to catch the ferry. now let me tell you this real  life story about how i got kicked by a drunk greek man. i am sitting there on my giant backpack in the subway and this man comes up to me and gives me this really weird look, then he kicked me with hi swork boot, then i screamed, even though it was in slow motion because he was so drunk, but i screamed anyway. then he death stared the shit out of me, and i death stared the shit out of him. then witte and i ran away because we got scared.

then we got on the bus to the fairy. and i had my huggggge backpack on. and i was real squished with my big backpack on and witte was like "daina move over" then this weird barefoot old man with long hair and a beard was like "you have the power" so then i was like "alrigh ti have the power and i moved over" tight squeeze though,  then as we got off we found out that this old barefoot man was not in fact homeless but he has a whole backpacking family and backpacking baby. he had his entire life on his back and his family's too and his baby in front. then his backpacking family followed him onto his ferry forever.