Treatise on Coffee

So I’ve had coffee enough times now to understand its allure: it gets you buzzed. I mean it tastes good enough. As a kid I hated the smell, but once you add some milk and a dash of chocolate, it’s pleasing to my adult palette. Taste as a drinking motivator pales, however, in comparison to the wonderfully awake yet calm and floaty feeling the drink provides. It makes everything seem a bit less urgent and more manageable. Now granted this is after just one cup - Kelly assures me additional cups will add jitteriness, which I can easily see. I have to concentrate on pacing myself when drinking coffee, since my goal-oriented mentality would have me plow through it immediately, as I do food. In conclusion, now when I hear people say “Let’s go get a cup of coffee”, I will hear “Let’s go get buzzed.” Do *not* discuss the buzzy pleasure of coffee with anyone who works for the government. If the government fully understands this vice, surely they will make it illegal or allow Pfizer to patent it and charge $60 a cup.

Yesterday Kelly and I visited the Vatican. We saw two main attractions: St. Peter’s Basilica and the Sistine Chapel. St. Peter’s was awesome. Huge structures, awesome views, gigantic sculptures. It’s an enormous church housing the remains of a bunch of dead Pope’s, each surrounded by sculpture. It also has services being held in the different wings, nuns bowing their heads before statues, and a confessional area. Just a real cool place to experience.

The Sistine Chapel was fairly neat, but it was no St. Peter’s. The Sistine Chapel itself is a big ceiling covered in paintings whose vibrant colors almost looked three dimensional to me. Apparently they recently cleaned the dirt and grime from the ceiling, making the colors much more vibrant. It’s a great room to stand in, for sure. However, the way they have the Sistine Chapel experience set up doesn’t work. You are forced through a maze of a museum…at least 30 rooms…before you get to the main event. And each room has sculptures, art, tapestries, and paintings on the ceiling. By the time you get to the Sistine Chapel, it’s just one more room with a painted ceiling. It’s like visiting an exhibit housing the world’s biggest rubber band ball, where the path to see it leads through dozens of rooms of ever-increasingly large rubber band balls. It numbs the impact of the biggest ball.

Today we visited a photo museum, which turned out to be a bunch of shots of celebrities in Italy in the 50’s, 60’s, and 70’s. It was like a giant People magazine from 40 years ago. I’m stopping this paragraph right here, because it’s very boring.

We’ve been in Rome for 5 days now, and we’re planning to stay for a couple more, then on to Cinque Terra.