St. Paul's (and Football)

Today we had to get up at 7:00 (1:00 a.m. American time) to go to St. Paul's Basilica. While it was not my ideal time to go visit a church, it ended up being pretty interesting. The courtyard outside the basilica has an imposing staue of St. Paul standing in the middle of it with a sword.

David Dawson-Vasquez, the director of the Rome program and our tour guide for the day, tells us that the sword represents the fact that he had his head chopped off, but Denis still thinks he looks like he wants to chop our heads off.

We then enter the actual basilica, where we are all temporarily awed by the huge ceiling and rows upon rows of stone pillars

Our attention is quickly diverted to a small desk where we are all recieving little radios, which are connected to a microphone attached to David's headset. We all fumble with them and try to figure out whether they are working or not for a couple of minutes. Then about five of us go back to get new ones, and hurry to catch up to the group. My attention is immediately caught by the imposing statue of St.Paul and his large, flowing Gandalf beard.

I try and take several pictures then, but the light is to bad. (I eventually come back later and take this picture using my mom's head as a place to rest the camera.) We then hurry to catch up to the rest of the group, where we learn a little but about the cieling

We then move on to the relic chapel (where they keep all the relics.) and see the chains that held St. Paul while he was imprisoned. After that, we go out into the cloister, where the monks walk and pray.

We take a few more pictures and then head back into the main part of the basilica, take a picture of the holy doors, and leave.

I had a very eventful day, which I will not lay out in detail here, but the short story is that it turns out that I am going to be playing American football, of all sports, while I am here, but it is now 12:30 in the morning, so I will give more details about this tomorrow.

-Thomas