Day 42 Rome:

Today we are booked in for a tour of the Vatican at 10am. This is going to be pretty special we think. We opted for a “skip the line” tour because every time we have gone past the Vatican on the open top bus the line has been ridiculously long. This will ensure us of “no waiting”........just to repeat that.....“no waiting” to get into the Vatican museum and St. Peters Basilica. We leave the apartment for the 40 minute walk to St. Peters Basilica and get there in 25 minutes (way to go team!!). We find the meeting spot which is just outside the tour office about 400m from the basilica entrance and we wait. We had to be there 20 minutes early but we arrived with an extra 10 minutes up our sleeve. At this point the penny drops and I’m thinking if I’m doing a “skip the line” tour why am I sitting here waiting for half an hour??? I might as well be waiting in the queue with all the other people trying to get in. It gets to 10am and there is a heap of people waiting out the front of the office but no tour guide. At 10:10 some bird with a yellow sign walks out of the office and just starts walking in the direction of the Basilica, she doesn’t say anything, just starts walking. Half the people follow and half just hang around. We are thinking “is this our tour?” We’re looking around like idiots as are some other people and we ask this stupid, horrible woman from the tour company who is standing outside the front of the office if that was our tour and she just doesn’t answer us, as if we’re not even there. By this point the group have disappeared into the crowd, god knows where they’ve gone and we are still none the wiser. We go inside to ask for assistance, along with some other people and get told after about a 5 minute wait that “yes that was your tour and you need to find them and catch up”. There are a bazillion people out there how the hell do we find them??? We go running off but we have no hope of finding these people and Kris and I are absolutely fuming. We storm back to the office and we let rip and the lady behind the desk, who was actually quite nice, told us we didn’t actually have to be with the group and we could just go around to the entrance and we could go straight in. That was great but what about our tour guide, isn’t she meant to talk to us along on the tour and give us some info or something??? The woman behind the counter gives us directions to the entrance and it ends up being a 10 minute walk around the back of the Vatican. We get moving and make our way toward the Vatican entrance and the entire time I’m just about to explode like a kid with turrets syndrome. We get there and we go straight in and once inside we realise, that was the tour. These people slugged us to guide us from their bloody office to the front bloody entrance. They don’t take you on a tour through the Vatican, THAT WAS THE TOUR!!! And, we waited over an hour for the privilege!!! Kris turns to me and says “I’ve just about had it with this flipp’n joint” (note: some words were changed to accommodate the ‘G’ rating). This to us has just been another example of how they do things in Italy, they love taking your money but hate providing a service, or at least a good one. We continue on and try our hardest to calm down which takes a good half hour or so. We decide that we can’t let these people beat us. We walk through the Vatican on our way to the Sistine Chapel. The Vatican and the Sistine Chapel end up being amazing. It was a fantastic walk and a really amazing experience. We end up taking the tour guides exit from the Sistine Chapel. This is something we read on the internet. It takes you straight into St. Peters Basilica instead of the standard exit which takes you outside and back to the line. We enter the basilica and wow, this is special. What an amazing church. We wander around for a good while, go underneath the church floor to see the tombs of past Popes and we take the exit. What a fantastic experience that was and well worth all the hassles we had to go through. We decide to pop into Piazza Novona for lunch on the way home and get to enjoy the clown from last night doing his thing here as well while we eat. We walk back to the apartment and as like yesterday we whack a movie on for the kids while Kris and I have a kip before heading out for dinner back down at the Pantheon. Again, we head over to Valentino’s for gelato and back home to bed. A pretty good day in the end.