More about Rome- my favorites

Walking the ancient road

 Two weeks ago in Rome it was Tuesday, my favorite day there. We used our Roma passes to get to Ostica Antica, the remains of the ancient Roman seaport (both the river and sea moved away from the area and it was abandoned.) We took the Metro to the Rome-Lido train, and got there as the site opened, it was us and  a group of French teenagers and a couple other people wandering around.  By the time we had walked the entire site, the rest of the tourists had arrived, and we ate our sandwiches and cookies we had packed in a backpack that morning, sitting on a curb, under the trees.

this was a tavern, see the wall frescoes and mosaic floor and  ovens...wow

Amazing mosaic floors in this courtyar

 Garry even found an interesting grinding mill in the bakery area, it was the highlight of our ancient places we visited because there wasn't a crowd to walk through, and so much to see.

Us by the sea!

After lunch we took the train a few more stops and found the sea. Garry did manage to get his feet wet, but it took some doing as there was a movie wedding scene being shot on the beach and boardwalk, we even walked past the actress playing the bride heading out of makeup to the beach.

We still had a lot of afternoon left and jumped off a few subway stops on the Metro to check out St Pauls, and  Pyramid stop which really has a pyramid! It looks new because it was recently fixed up, but was built almost 2000 years ago as a burial place when Romans were fascinated by Egypt and stuck around because it got built into the wall around the city. The castle-looking buliding nearby was a city gate and is a museum with many of the things recovered from the area we went to in the morning.

Not Trevi Fountain, but one with water!

We went back to the apartment for a couple hours and headed out to find Trevi fountain and some other sites as evening was coming. We found it, but it is under repair, so only saw tourists squeezing thorugh a walkway over it, so we continued on to find out where everyone was going and ended up at the Pantheon, and finding Marc Antony's column, and some fountains with water, and even walked around the backside of the Coliseum in our quest to return home, we hopped a bus to it and then took the Metro home.

more working fountains!

Marc Antony's column, as impressive as Trajan's 

The Coliseum again? It seemed we were finding it over and over

We topped the evening off with dinner at the sidewalk cafe around the corner from the apartment around nine pm, most nights I cooked stuff we picked up at the grocery store, so it was a real treat to eat pasta outside with a violin playing, too.












Of course, the highlights of Rome for me was the art I had wanted to see since high school, After 15 minutes of looking up at the Sistine chapel ceiling, Garry asked if I was ready to go, and I whispered back no, and made him wait another ten minutes. I found out that Michelangelo's Moses sculpture was in a church and made Garry wait for more than an hour Saturday afternoon when it was closed when we got there before two (St Peter's in Chains is really hard to find, the map was not a lot of help, we missed it in the morning and it was closed from 12:20 to 3 pm) We got reservations tickets online for the Borghese Gallery Friday and it was wonderful, even Garry enjoyed it and we spent most of the day walking in the surrounding park, which was lovely.

Disappointing distance between the Pieta  and me at St Peters

ceiling Vatican museum- look up people!

ceiling Borghese Gallery

David sculpture

amazing ceilings

bottom - by Leonardo Da Vinci

worth waiting for- Moses bottom center

A little Thanksgiving

ready and waiting

Garry had decided we should have all the farm workers for a Thanksgiving dinner when the harvest was over, but by the time the corn was all combined it was time for our trip to Rome, so we decided on Thursday at noon. I thought there would be at least ten people, but only one of the milker ladies came (Yana was at the market, I think I understood). I had dinner ready by noon, with the rolls just coming out of the oven, the chickens (two 5 pounders, stuffed, no turkey at Metro on Tuesday) were carved by Garry, with almost all the trimming of a North American style dinner (no jello salads, and no cranberry sauce).

Maxim Rudei was the first to arrive with his wife Yulia and little Vika, as you can see she is adorable, and about six months old now, and sitting up.

Now we are ready to eat with max and Andrey

Driving in Ukraine... look the truck is on our side of the road!

Always be alert when driving in Ukraine!
Sorry somehow this post never got published last month and I didn't notice!

Last week ? One Sunday afternoon we were returning home from Dnepro when I took this photo, we were driving along the four lane divided highway, when I blinked and said...

 "Garry is that truck coming toward us?"

I think it is...wow, I can't believe it, that is so dangerous! 

Yep, it is definitely on our side of the road, what if one of the cars going
 180 Km an hour in the passing lane had been coming?

the driver coming onto the road from the other highway must be really confused...

because there is of course, no warning signs, no traffic cones, no signage, to warn oncoming traffic about this temporary change in traffic patterns as they say at home...

you may be wondering what caused this potential head on collision situation...





earlier that week they had opened a new military/police checkpoint on the other side of the divided highway where there is the guard rail for about a kilometer or two where they built the new highway intersection a couple years ago...







which caused this accident (possibly because of the conflicting signage which tells you to slow down merge into the left lane, slow down more, move into the right lane, slow down and stop...

This minor accident, the police are there, no ones ever moves cars no matter how
 minor the accident until the report is done in hopes of collecting insurance
 they have put four orange cones across and are directing traffic over

which must have caused this accident, so they sent the cars onto the wrong
side of the road until they got past the guardrail (mostly there isn't one)

The next week they fixed this when the finally got the big cement barricades for people to drive around installed at the checkpoint, which is still in operation

Ukraine is not big on early warning of workers in the road either...

About ten metres at most, even on the highway, we could see this
crane in the city long before seeing the sign

Always look for motorcycles weaving through traffic in the city

and for farm machinery and bicycles

watch for cows and chickens in the road in the country

marchutkas (route vans) stopping for passengers in the city

the slow cars on the highway (those are bags of cabbage)

and that is a walnut buyer leaving the village

tractors driving toward traffic on the highway mowing the meridian
 (no signs except on the tractor)

cars making extra lanes at red lights (and switching lanes like crazy)

and the really fast cars blowing past everyone else (its like they own the road)

Prague and Rome...or eight days alone in a crowd

We actually had a relaxing time away from everyone, it was the anniversary trip we had talked about last year, but never got around to going on.

We arrived back home in the village Monday evening (October 27th), Max Rudei drove the van back to Kiev and Garry drove home in just over 5 hours, a new record, the road between has more bumps from patches than holes these days. In other words a rough ride, but less tire damage! Max brought a friend, like he did when he dropped us at the airport.On the way there, he translated what his friend said about an hour after leaving, as Garry sped through the dark in the fog- we left at 5 am- that he could not believe how calm and quiet I was in the front seat, as any women he knew would be scared and yelling... and I was not. Of course I have ridden with Garry driving for years now. I do occasionally suggest looking out for danger... but quietly, I guess.

A lovely view from the top of a hill in Prague (while we were lost)

We did have our share of adventures, like trying to find our hotel room in Prague, where we overnighted to get from Kiev to Rome. We took the bus and tram like the lady at the airport suggested instead of an expensive taxi, but turned the wrong direction and walked for more than a hour up and down hills and streets. We found it as dusk was falling after an hour of walking.

We did enjoy a late dinner out with traditional foods and two hours of sightseeing early Saturday morning before heading to the airport for the flight to Rome.

We booked the same hotel for our overnight back,since we know where it was.  However we couldn't find it again at ten pm, because the tram line was under repair, so what we remembered didn't work to find it! We did finally figure out and got there around eleven pm!

Prague at 7:30 am

9 am and we found the clock I was looking for as it was about to ring

We went to church Sunday here, in a church dedicated to Martyrs and built
in an ancient Roman bath site, original church was designed by Michelangelo

 The first day was Sunday and we stuck close to the apartment to rest our tired feet after our Prague adventure.

The service was held here in Italian or maybe Latin, we missed the English one

After the church service, in an ancient Catholic church around the corner from our rented apartment,  we visited a couple of nearby museums, one about the huge bath complex that the church was built in, and had an early night, so we could get to the Coliseum when it opened on Monday morning.

The organ was played for the service and before, the church was redone
in the 17th and 18th centuries

The only thing still of the original Michelangelo design
 inside was the foyer ceiling apparently

front door of the church

more from Sunday

Frescoes in a museum- Palazzo Massimo

The Coliseum 

Inside the complex of the Baths of Diocletian, part of the National Roman museum, the ticket was seven euros and you could visit four over three days, we did two on Sunday and found one more of them on Wednesday before our ticket expired.

Monday

We saw all the historical, archaeological highlights of Rome as you can see in these photos... and that was just Monday! We got to the Coliseum before it opened at nine am and beat the crowds with day one of our 3 day Roma Pass - it gets you into two places free, reduced price on the ones after and gets you on public transport for the three days.

after a couple days Garry got bored with broken statues

The Forum area 

The ticket includes the Forum and Palentine hill areas so we walked all of that by two pm, it was near the forums that a lost my five dollar watch I bought in NJ, so we were really carefree after that!
That night Garry wanted to see the area in the dark so we took the Metro (subway) and walked around until nine pm, or later.

Coliseum as night fell 

Garry says his favorite place was the Pantheon, which we found on Tuesday night while we went looking for Trevi fountain (by the way it is dry they are fixing it up) and returned to it on our last Sunday in Rome.

inside at night

There was always a crowd at the Panetheon

It was turned into a church early in Christian Rome, so survived in good shape

This looked like early church decor

the famous ceiling with a hole-

You'll have to wait for the next post to find out my favorite sights of Rome.