Welcome me to Happy Days Hostel. I have not met the Fonze. Nor have I met the 2 Canadian girls who supposedly owned the place, nor have I been staying in the actual hostel, where surprisingly enough there is not an internet connection, not a common room, not two bathrooms and certainly not breakfast.

New ownership . . . Ivano, hes kinda like the Fonze, but Italian, and he graduated from UT, hes a happy guy with lots of hair and he loves the ladies.

Ive taken to making now real decisions this trip. In each hostel I have found someone and just started following them around. Yesterday I followed Laurence and Ellen and Alison around. Laurence left this morning, so today I followed Ellen and Alison around. I might have to strike out on my own tomorrow.

I had big plans to go see the Pope, but I forgot to go pick up the tickets today, I was busy freezing bits of my anatomy off at the coliseum and other crumbly places.

It was amazing, everywhere I looked it was something old and fantastic, before too long my brain overloaded and I just started snapping pictures of everything two or three times.
Im going to come home with 500 pictures of buildings and columns and fountains and other old crap that I can not identify.

Yesterday we went to the Vatican. We had a tour of St. Peters Basilica and the Vatican museum. The guide kept saying things like, This is the biggest church in the world! and This is the biggest Dome in the world!, and This is the biggest museum in the world! Then she would have to qualify, well, not the biggest church, but the biggest catholic church, and this is the biggest dome in a catholic church, and this museum isn’t actually the biggest, but it does have more stuff.

It seems that the Popes of old were a bunch of bastards. Im going to have to do some research into this. Some of them had horse races in the Papal courtyard, illegitimate babies, pillaging of the monument of antiquity, glorifying themselves by putting their names all over the churches, having statues and monuments made for themselves . . . etc.
I have especially enjoyed the Rome tourist gift shops. They have the tackiest things here, of course I have made several beauteous purchases. I bought a nativity in a nutshell, about 5 mini rosaries, a few real rosaries from the Vatican, postcards and I have my eyes out for a fake Gucci there are African guys on the streets selling them for 10 euros.