Rome - Day 7

It's Sunday and international time change day, so we lost an hour of sleep.  We knew, however, that the Vatican museum has free entry on the last Sunday of the months, so we went there first.  At 0900, the line was approximately 2 hours long...PLAN B!!!

We headed to the National Museum of Rome, one of the places we could get into for free with our Roma Passes.  We took the subway to the main (scary) train station, Termini, and started roaming around guided by Rick Steves' map of the area.  We took some pics of a old, cool bascilica (church) and this is one of my favorite pictures of Rome:

We continued onto the museum, which was full of mostly statues.  Some of our favorites were the disc thrower, Casear, The Boxer and Aphrodite (seen below).  

After the museum, we headed back to the apartment for a quick lunch and nap.  That afternoon, we decided to do one of Rick Steves' suggested walks through Rome.  This one was actually called the night walk, but we wanted to see everything in the sunlight!  We took the metro to the Spagna station and stopped in at one of the most elaborate McDondald's in the whole world.  It was so cute!  They made it look like a Italian bistro with little nooks with small tables and live plants, etc.  We DID NOT eat there!!!  But, I DID forget to take pictures.  We went to the Spanish Steps and it was raining lightly.  There was a large group of teenagers on the steps singing very loudly and it was really annoying, so we continued on the "night walk" to the Trevi fountain.

SPANISH STEPS

So, imagine yourself just walking down narrow streets with businesses, shops, restaurants and apartments.  All of the sudden you can hear what sounds like a waterfall or huge gush of water...and you see this:

the most beautiful and elaborate fountain you've ever seen is built into the back of one of the buildings and hundreds of people are gathered around awed by it's glory....amazing!  Then...POURING RAIN.  Rain so thick it starts dripping through your umbrella and seeps through our rain jacket onto your shoulders...miserable rain!!!  We weren't far from the metro, so we headed back there for some shelter.  We were soaking wet by now :-(

We returned to our neighborhood, where the rain was steady, but not pouring and stopped into a little shop for a couple of pizza sandwiches.  We went back to the apartment to dry off and ventured out later that night for our first GELATO!!!  Yummy...I got one called Millenium which was chocolate and caramel and Brett got cookies and cream!  Why haven't we had one of these after every meal so far????