The only thing a weekend in Rome serves to do is convince you that a return trip is an absolute necessity.
Myself and a couple of guys from work took an overnight train from Munich to Rome on Friday night, ditched our bags at the hotel, and caught the underground to Vatican City. The Vatican Museum was overwhelming, with more history per square foot than I've seen in my entire life. The tour finished with the Sistine Chapel, which was completely different than what I expected. Everyone seems to think that The Creation of Adam (the naked guy reaching out to the older, bearded naked guy) is the whole of it, but once you're in the chapel itself, you realize it's only one of a series of ceiling panels in a room that's covered, floor to ceiling, in frescoes, paintings, and gilt. From there, we went to St. Peter's Basilica, which is basically a Catholic showroom. Behold the earthly grandeur of the divine, and all that...it's pretty amazing, even for someone who hasn't got a great deal of respect for Catholicism. We climbed the three hundred twenty steps to the cupola, and it was well worth it on a cloudless, 30 degree morning...the view of Rome is spectacular.
As a nice counterpoint to the morning's peity, we spent a couple hours bargaining with Senegalese hustlers by the Tiber. Nothing like ten euro "Gucci" shades to make you look swank. I picked up a "Prada" bag for my Mum, and Theo (whose Nigerian accent mysteriously re-appears when he haggles) grabbed a couple for various females back home.
We saw the Pantheon in the afternoon, and spent a little time chilling with some excellent gelati in Piazza Navona before heading to Piazza di Spagna to leer at the incredible Italian women.
After dinner we checked out the Colosseum and the Forum (both are much more impressive at night), threw some coins Trevi Fountain, and went on a fruitless search for something resembling a club. Finding nothing, we ended up taking advantage of some truly sensible liquor laws by buying cold beer from a street vendor, and drinking it with a couple hundred others on the Spanish Steps, in full view of at least three of Rome's numerous police forces (I think I counted five over the weekend).
We started Sunday with daylight excursions to the Colosseum and Palatine Hill, followed by a walk down Via dei Fori Imperiali to the Forum, and on to Piazza Venezia. At a certain point, the marble and gilt all starts to run together though, and it was definitely time to slow things down. Fortunately, Via del Corso, a main shopping street, runs North from Piazza Venezia. We ambled along that looking for clothes and shoes for a few hours, ending up at Piazza di Popolo for the best gelati of the trip, and more girl-watching.
I let my inner food wank (not much different than my outer food wank, really) out at Il Brillo Parlante, then we booked it back to the hotel to grab our bags for the overnight train back to Munich.
The whirlwind style planning that we did made me nervous, but it actually worked out fairly well. We knocked out the obligatory Touristy Must-Sees, and we had a little time to get an appreciation for the less organized, social side of the city. If I'm ever back in the area (a highly probable possibility), I'm definitely coming back to lounge on the beach and tour the better restaurants.
Work is going reasonably well, but I reiterate, fuck that. Next weekend will be perfect to do some exploring in and around Munich, but I may end up in Zurich weekend after next if I can rent a bike. Place your chocolate orders now.

Just a quick note: My school account is now fucked. All correspondence should come here now.

My poor feet. It's definitely time for some new shoes. This Sunday, I spent nearly five hours wandering around Schloss Nymphenburg, a massive, statue-filled palace garden that was originally a country estate on the outskirts of Old Munchen. The schloss (castle) forms something of a gate to a spectacular park complex.
The schloss itself has an audio tour available for those of us unfortunate enough not to read German. It takes about forty minutes to make your way through the public parts of the palace, starting with the Stone Hall, a frescoed celebration hall with a gallery and vaulted glass doors that open out onto the park on one wall, and the canal that leads to the city on the other. The two wings that are open are what generally what you would expect of the apartments of European nobility, with a few interesting quirks, like a series of thirty-six portraits of the most beautiful women the Elector could find.
A little North and West of the schloss is the Magdalenenklause, possibly the strangest church I've ever been in. From the outside, it looks like a worn stucco and brick house in the middle of a wooded section of the park. The inside though, is downright weird. The walls and ceiling are completely covered in stucco that's been formed to look like coral, and inlaid with geometric seashell patterns. The main room is divided into a reception hall in the front, and a chapel in the rear. The chapel is where it starts to get disturbing, with a fountain made of the same coral-stucco that covers the walls that features a weeping Mary Magdalene, and a little crucifix on the left. On the left wall, there's what appears to be a grotto shrine (kneeling benches and all), again made of the coral-stucco, with warped pillar candles on either side of a larger crucifix. The whole place is dark, spooky, and more than little bit cool.
North of the Magdalenenklause, the Botanischer Garten (g'head, guess what that translates to) is about eight city blocks square of plants from around the world, with a compartmentalized hothouse that's divided into halls, each featuring a different climate, or family of plants. I spent more than an hour just in the hothouse...the humidity, and the overpowering scent of fresh greenery is something I don't get enough of living in Toronto.
Amalienburg and Badenburg are smaller satellite palaces, Southwest of the schloss. Badenburg has a tiled bath that's about the size of a large bedroom, with a 360-degree overhead balcony/viewing gallery, while Amalienburg looks relatively plain until you see that the ceilings are covered in 2.5D silver fresco/sculptures depicting various classical nature scenes.
Yes, yes, theoretically, I'm here to work, but fuck that...what could possibly interest you in twelve hour days at a telecom company? Next weekend: Rome.

Flying transatlantic economy is like being trapped in an internationalized Wal-mart for eight hours at a stretch. That fat woman who can't fit a standard seat belt around her bulbous girth might be having a little more difficulty because she speaks only German, but don't be fooled, she's still the same lycra clad cow that blocks your progress through the familiar byways of discount retail. Those three bastard spawn might be howling in Turkish while they pound on the back of your seat, but it doesn't mean you want to grind them into sausage any less than their suburban counterparts.
If I'm ever between jobs, I'm going to found a daycare service staffed entirely by former long-haul stewardesses. Those women are saints.

This is a Guinness. Served at Gravity, a bar on the eleventh floor of the Guinness Storehouse. Quite literally the freshest pint of Guinness available to the public.

And this is explains that sudden, powerful urge to be me on the Saturday morning of the Easter weekend.

This pretty much sums up Dublin in a thousand words:

Five years of clapped-out, nasty sagging, twin mattresses. Five years of bare metal bed frames. Five years of tiny blankets that I bought in 1997.
Introducing that which will be filling about seventy five percent of my new room's floor space: My giant-ass bed.
King size, baby. King size. I promise I'll have a couple of Ireland posts up before I leave for Germany on Tuesday.

Plenty of time to blog, nothing to blog about. Plenty to blog about, no time to blog. Soon, my pretties, soon.