Sorry for the delay. It has been 2 months since Italy, but I have been busy enjoying the rest of my time here. I have moved out of my appartment and am now traveling around before I come back to the states.
Italy
My friend Kristin and I went to Italy for spring break. The first city we went to was Genoa. It is a port city where Christopher Columbus was supposedly born and grew up. We only stayed there for a night. It took us forever to find a hotel and while we were looking we saw all these amazing pizza and gelato places. We finally got settled in a pretty cool hotel and then we headed out to check out the town. There was a cool little market that was exactly like the Christmas markets in Germany, complete with German food and everything. So unfortunately, our first night in Italy we ate German food for dinner, but it was still really good :-D
The next day we headed off to Venice. I loved Venice. It was so beautiful with its canals! However, it rained most of the time we were there. I actually felt really dumb when I first got there. I asked at the tourism office how to get to the San Marco Plaza and she asked if I would like to walk or take a boat. And I said a bus would be fine and she gave me a really weird look and said "There are no buses in Venice" haha. I felt dumb. So their "bus" system is really a system of boats but it does the same thing. It has schedules and different lines. It was pretty cool. Everything pretty much took place on the water. Even the garbage "trucks" were boats. The taxi's too. It was fun. The first night we met up with some friends and finally got some pizza :-D The next day Kristin and I took a boat over to a little island called Murano that is known for its glass blowing. It was really beautiful there and there were so many glass blown pieces. We then went back to Venice and hung out a little more. There really wasn't much to do in Venice because it is such a small city. We did meet up with some friends though and met a couple cool people.
Our next stop was Rome. The first 2 nights there we stayed with a couchsurfer a little outside Rome. He drove us around the Colosseum the first night and it was so beautiful!!! It unfortunately rained a lot in Rome too. :-( But we took advantage of some of the good weather to go to the Colosseum and the Roman Forum (where all of the ancient ruins are) It was really cool there! Its so old that its amazing. It kinda sucks that everything is so dilapidated though, but I guess that thats the cost for still having it there. We stayed in Rome for about 5 days. It was a pretty good amount of time. We got to see everything that we wanted to without feeling rushed. We spent a lot of time at Trevi Fountain people watching. :-D It is such a good place to people watch.
After we left Rome we decided to stop in Pisa on the way to Florence, because it is a must. We stopped for just a few hours, saw the leaning tower of Pisa, pushed the tower down, even tried to kick the tower down and drank some wine. There is not really much to do in Pisa besides see the leaning tower so we hopped back on the train and headed to Florence.
Florence was the last stop on our Italy trip. We stayed with some of Kristin’s friends who were studying there. We walked around the city a little the first day and kinda chilled out. The second day we decided to take a day trip to Siena. From there the trip just went downhill. The guy on the train was a jerk. We had bought tickets even though we had a railpass because the tickets were so cheap we didn’t want to waste a day. However, in Europe they have a system of validation where you have to validate any ticket before you get on a train. Well we were in such a hurry to the train because we got there just in time after having run, that we forgot to validate our tickets. The ticket taker informed us of our mistake and proceeded to tell us that we owed him 20 euros each….however, we had railpasses so we decided instead of paying 20 euros we can just use a day on our railpass. So we filled in a day and then he came back and said we couldn’t do that because it was too late, you have to fill in the date before you get on the train. So we had two options: we pay him 20 euros each or we go to the police station when we stop and deal with them…So we chose the police station figuring that the police would be able to get this guy off of our backs, since we knew he was just going to pocket the money. Nope. The police could do nothing against him, since apparently he was in the right. So we ended up paying 50 euros each for a meager day trip from Florence. I left out the gruesome details because it makes me mad to think about it but in short, we were angry the whole time in Siena and it was pouring rain and windy, so therefore not a good time….We headed back to Florence afterwards and stayed there another couple days before heading back to Aix for the last few days of our spring break. I spent them relaxing and not thinking of crazy Italians.
I have done a lot of stuff since then but seeing as I am almost home I am sure everyone will hear about everything soon enough. I have recently gone to Ireland, Amsterdam and London with Saqib and his brother. I had a lot of fun in each place with lots of crazy stories. I am in Strasbourg now, a little over a week left until I go back to the states and I am planning on spending that time in France :-D
