Journal 7: Rome After Two Weeks

I love Rome. I love the food, the layout, the history, the art, everything. Yet, I don't think I would want to live here. I'm am so tired. Today we visited the Pantheon and even though it was amazing, I just didn't feel like I had the energy to appreciate it fully. When I went to the Vatican a week ago, there weren't many people around yet because it was so early in the morning. It was peaceful and I felt like I was able to take all the sights in. When we went to the Colosseum, it was so large that it was easy to walk around and find your little corner of it and just admire the structure. But today, although the Pantheon is quite large, there were hundreds of people trying to see everything that I was trying to see. I can't blame them of course because I'm just as much of an annoying tourist as they are but the fast pace that I was looking at it was upsetting now that I look back at it. And I feel like that is the way it is with a lot of the places we have been visiting. I could spend hours in some of the museums we go to but unfortunately we have to fit so much history into three weeks that there is a time limit on everything. This rushing to see absolutely everything is a big contributor to my exhaustion.

I don't want to leave though. True, I'm definitely not cut out for the city and I miss the country side and houses (honestly, I don't think I've seen one house in Rome) but this city is my favorite by a long shot. It doesn't have the tall buildings made of metal and glass. It has history, and stone. Instead of tearing down old buildings, they restore the old ones and remodel them to fit the desired need. Yesterday we visited Trajan's markets and the museum was held in the ruins of the markets!

This is one of the streets we walk through to get
to the accent center. Yes, cars drive here.

It doesn't have the the concrete sidewalks or the grid-like streets. It twists and turns and some how I make it to where I need to be without actually knowing how I got there. It's fun to see how people can just walk on the cobble stones and cars just come along. Yes, they honk at you and their driving is even worse than those in North Dakota, but I love the interaction.