Happy Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving Everyone!!
As we think about all the wonderful experiences we have had this year living in Budapest and traveling, we are very thankful for our opportunities.  We are also thankful our parents have been able to visit us and share our experiences, and that through technology we have been able to stay in touch with family and friends back home.  We wish everyone a Happy Thanksgiving and hope you are able to share it with those you love.  After the big thanksgiving meal, we'll all probably be looking like these pictures of our pets.  Enjoy!

Pantheon - Rome

The Pantheon was another amazing place to visit.  You don't need to pay to get in and there wasn't a line to get in but someone came up and asked us if we wanted to join a tour and our previous had gone so well we figured why not. Again we learned so much more about the history and architecture than we would have on our own so it really was money well spent.

It's a cool building and as you can see in the pictures below there is hole in the top of the dome to let in the sun and the rain, it's always open.  The pattern around the dome is not just cool looking but it's also functional, have those shapes cut out made the dome weigh less.  Something else that was very clever was that instead of just using scaffolding to get the higher areas they just filled the Pantheon up with dirt.  The clever part was that the left gold and other valuables in the dirt and then the people of the city would go in and take out as much dirt as they could hoping there would be money in there.

The Vatican

One of the many cool things about visiting Rome is that you can also very easily visit the smallest independent state in the world both by area and population, Vatican City.  Of course the Vatican is home to the Pope and Catholicism but you don't have to be Catholic to appreciate it.  The seco
nd largest museum behind the Louvre in Paris is there, the Sistine Chapel and St. Peter's Basilica. The lines there are crazy so like we did at the Colosseum we joined a tour that allowed us to skip the lines and have a tour of the museum, the Sistine Chapel and St. Peter's.  Even without skipping the line the tour would have been worth it to hear the history, especially to hear about Michelangelo and the Sistine Chapel and the Last Judgement. It's a pretty crazy store and let us know different things we should look for, sadly no pictures were allowed in the Sistine Chapel.