Several EF College Study Tours staff members are traveling with EF groups on tour this spring and summer. Two EF Tour Consultants, Jackie Thomas and Janice Johnson, are currently on tour with a CST group in Italy and Greece. Jackie emailed us this update from Rome:
Janice and I spent the beginning of our tour in Rome. Rome is amazing. The first day we arrived, we took a walking tour of the Trevi Fountain, the Spanish Steps and the Pantheon. It was great to walk around the city and get a feel for Italian life.
We had about two hours of free time in the afternoon to explore and have lunch at a little café. We ended up getting lost and having a glass of wine at an outside restaurant in Piazza Navona, which was full of artists and vendors selling paintings and caricatures. Interestingly enough, we were serenaded by a man playing the guitar … and he happened to be playing Pink Floyd! I think the best part of Rome was our guided tour the second day of the trip. Our guide took us to the Colosseum as well as the Vatican, which were both fascinating.
I think what all of us will take away most from our guide (who was fantastic) was the fact that Rome is a "lasagna." There are several layers, some dating way back and some modern, and that every time they dig, they find new layers. This is the reason why it's so hard for them to build subway lines in the city, since every time they dig they find another ruin and have to stop working and call in archaeologists to explore the site! I thought it was a great analogy … and needless to say when we went to lunch that afternoon everyone ate lasagna!
That afternoon, we took a tour of the Vatican and saw the famous Sistine Chapel as well as the Pietà. Both the chapel and St. Peter's itself were amazing and beautiful. I think everyone was a little bit in awe of the whole thing!
One of the funniest parts of the tour was when our guide stopped by a statue of a young woman who was scantily dressed in the Vatican Museum. He pointed out that she was wearing barely anything at all and compared her to Britney Spears, stating that there is nothing new under the sun … even hundreds of years ago, there were figures like pop idol Britney Spears!
Our guide left us with a joke at the end of the tour: A priest and a bus driver both pass away. When they knock on the doors of heaven, the bus driver is let in first. The priest is very upset by this. When he is finally let in, he asks why he had to wait and the driver did not. The gatekeeper replied, "While you were preaching, everyone was sleeping; while the bus driver was driving, everyone was praying!"
