Shawn's Israel trip - Day 1 - Feb 15,2005 - Toronto to Rome

[Shawn Cuthill]

Flying out of Terminal 1 today at 5PM - we are flying overnight and will arrive in Rome around 10AM local time in Rome.
We have an entire day in Rome, until 11PM, with a tour guide.

[Shawn Cuthill]

This "day" was actually a combination of 3 days in one. It started somewhere around 5PM when we arrived at Pearson airport. I had promised Lukas some pictures of me while I was gone so I took a few at the terminal. Luckily for us, when hayley and I walked in Grant, Greg and a few others were just checking in so I was able to check my bags in right away.
We chatted for a while, then proceeded to the security gate, where we said our hello's and I said my goodbye to Hayley. This is going to be the longest we've ever been apart in the 4 years we've been married.

On the trip there were 15 of us:

Steve Bray - Pastor of Grace Baptist, PEI
John McKim - from "Friends of Israel" & Charlottetown Bible Chapel in PEI
Gerald St. Laurent - full-time worker in the maritimes (and my roommate for the trip)
Grant Canfield - Emmanuel Bible Camp manager
Greg MacIsaac - PEI legend
Mike Klomp - Charlottetown Youth group leader
Dwight Houston -
Danny Robbins - works at New Brunswick Bible Institute
Al Kebral (sp?) - speaker/counsellor
Brian Good - Trents' cousin
John Plantz - "Friends of Israel" in Winnipeg
Mark DeJagger - from Bethany in Halifax
Ross Lewis - of the legendary Lewis clan (Greg's father-in-law)
Doug - who now hates me because I can't remember his last name , who is a Pastor from Nova Scotia
Little old me (who was the youngest by at least 10 years)

First we had an overnight flight to Milan. The flight left at 5PM from Toronto and arrived at around 7AM Milan time the next day. The flight wouldn't have been so bad if it hadn't been for the excessive beeping from the seat in front of us!! All night the silly little "attendant" beep kept going off. Literally all night. Beep...Beep....Beep for hours! No joke. They tried turning the power on and off (just on the inside). The stewards and stewardesses all took turns trying to figure the silly thing out and eventually they got some guy with some mechanical skills to come and actully disconnect the wires so it couldn't beep anymore.

After finally arriving in Milan, I sadly discovered there was no wireless internet . Well there was but it cost something ridiculous and we only had about a half hour lay over. Next we flew to Rome, arriving there around 11AM.

Upon arriving in Rome we were all wiped, but there was no rest for the wicked and we loaded into a tour bus to toot around Rome on a guided tour ALL that day. First we took the bus from the airport to the city. Our first tour guide was pretty cool, he was interactive and joked with us about how Italians drive.

He said "we don't park our cars, we abandon them", and "the white lines on the road are just to give the city some colour". He also warned us about pick-pockets and had a bit of a Costas Savvas accent. Rome's population is over 4 million people. They have built a ring-road, similar to Athens. There are over 2 million cars in Rome, and so they have also adopted a traffic system like Athens has, but a bit different. In Rome, there are certain days you just can not drive a car, so everyone has a car and a scooter.

We got to see several things on the way:
- the pope's summer residence
- the apinini mountain region
- Olympic center (Olympics held in Italy in 1960)
- Church of St. Peter & Paul (over 600 churches in Rome)
- arches of Musilini
- city walls, built 2nd century AD (aurillian walls - maxus arillius)
- Roman baths
- stairs in the house of Pontius Pilate
- the holy door (opened by pope at the beginning of jubilee year)
- "St. Paul outside the walls" church
- St. Peters, etc. etc. etc.

Sadly he was only the guide that picked us up. After we had driven in to Rome we met our official tour guide for the rest of the day "Murella".

She was quite knowledgeable, and had a nack for talking with her eyes closed, overemmmmpphasssiiiiiiiiiizing important points and waving her hand in the air to get our attention. Al quickly learned this skill and will hopefully be applying to the "tour guide society of Rome"

There were a number of places we went on the bus:

Sistene Chapel/St. Peter's - I'd been here before for Linda's birthday during our Athens Olympic trip, however I had never been inside. The place was huge, outside and inside. I discovered that the Pope only uses the front window for huge yearly "blessings" or events. His regular little window is up, to the right of the main chapel (second window from the left) where he does his blessing every Sunday.
Murella gave us loads of useless facts about the place.
I learned that the big pillar in the middle of the square is an Egyptian oblisque, marking the site where Peter was crucifies upside down.
If you stand facing the chapel, there is a statue of

The Coleseum - I stayed in the bus for this one, and sadly missed out on Mike Klomp getting roughed up by the actors dressed up like ancient Roman soldiers. Seems that the boys got too close to the soldier, who was doing his presentation for a tour group, and, seeing as we were unpaying heathens, thrust his hand over the camera lens to forbid our picture-taking hyjinx.

Musilini's "Victory" temple to celebrate the unification of Italy - this was one thing I was looking forward to while being in Italy. I had seen this building before but had no idea what it was called.

Roman Forum - this was a very very cool spot that I didn't even know existed. The Roman forum was, I think, the first "settlement" of the Roman empire. There were tons of old things there, but the two coolest were:

1. The Jail where Paul was kept. It had a name, but I can't remember - like magdelene jail
2. A first-century inscription of the Romans carying away the Ark of the Covenant after destroying Jerusalem. Very Cool.

Towards the end of the tour it was freezing cold and so after seeing some ancient water source acqueduct and the "spanish steps" we checked in to a nice little place for dinner.

It was quite a surprise, since we were the first ones there, to see 2 singers saunter out of the kitchen and saranade us while we were waiting for our food! One man on a little guitar looking mandolin thing and a lady with a flute.

After dinner we were off to the airport to fly to Tel Aviv overnight. We boarded the flight without incident (there was that wierd guy who kept pacing around looking at our stuff). Mark DeJagger suggested we set up some posts and have a "foot-hockey" game while we waited, but we were too chicken to follow through
We boarded the fairly empty plane and the sleepless endurance race continued! Some got to stretch out as there were lots of empty seats, but most of us were too tired to move so we just slumped in our seats and let our neck muscles suffer while snoring away (well Danny more than the rest of us