May 8 - Fifth Day in Rome -

Today was St. Peter's day. Taxi to the square with a plan to walk around the front of the Basilica, take a few pics and call it a day. Plans have a habit of changing as we all know and quick as a wink, ours did too. As we got out of the cab we were met by this army of hawkers selling guided packages which claimed to avoid all of the line ups which at that moment were averaging about three and a half hours. Being the seasoned travelers that we are, we resisted all of them until we realized that we could not find the Tourist office Rick Steves recommends and were faced with a disappointing day. Just at that moment a very nice girl, working on her PhD in economics pounced and sold us a package which included the Vatican Museum, The Sistine Chapel and The Basilica, all guided by the best rated tour guide on Tripadvisor.
The guide was good, no doubt about it. She could talk for hours about every piece of art in the place and it often felt that way. Also, she didn't mention that 30 000 people a day are doing exactly what we wanted to do. That is walk for miles (literally) down narrow corridors and stairways trying to see the same works of art. As it was, we saw only one floor of the museum, thank god, before reaching the Sistine Chapel (after about two hours).
Call us heretics but the Chapel was underwhelming to us both. We can understand  the effort put into it, the fact that Michaelangelo almost went blind painting it on his back and that it took two years and so on but I guess it's just not our cup of tea. The last stop was the Basilica which is ginormous and incredible and almost impossible to fathom and it was a bit like a breath of fresh air because it did not feel crowded and you could feel a breeze wafting through the space feeding us oxygen.
If we had to do it again, we would skip the first two parts and just go into the Basilica on a prepaid miss-the-line basis.
A taxi back to our 'hood and to our favourite restaurant for a seafood risotto and wine. By good fortune we sat next to a lovely couple from Houston and had a howling good time exchanging travel stories. Our dinner ended on a downpour. We got soaked and loved it.