Today we visited Vatican City. We wisely took the advice of others and made a reservation to get in. The wait time when we arrived around 10am had to have been at least 3 hours, and the line continued to grow all the while. Conveniently, we were able to more or less walk right in (there was still madness to get through before actually entering, but we just stuck to the buddy system and made it through intact and together). If you have already figured it out, I will say it very clearly - the Vatican makes Disneyland look like a ghost town. I have never seen so much humanity crammed into such a small area. So if you don't like crowds and are not dying to see the Sistine Chapel or St. Peter's Basilica, this is something you may want to skip.
So once we accepted that we would be in a continuous crush the entire day, we set out to enjoy ourselves. There are basically three major things to do in the Vatican: the Vatican museums, the Sistine Chapel, and St. Peter's Basilica. We started out by first just viewing the architecture of the Vatican itself, aka the Apostolic Palace, where the pope both lives and conducts business. The palace is created in a very classical nature, with tall clean columns and statues overlooking the square below. These are actually statues of various saints (I had to explain to Ryan that no, not all the saints are up there - there's just not enough room for that!).
