Friday, March 12, 2010
Sunday, March 7, 2010
Thoughts on Italy...
A water taxi, three buses, an airplane, several trains and sub zero temperatures later, Katy and I arrived back in London after a week of backpacking in Italy. We started in Rome where we shared a hostel near Termini station with 6 random guys- 2 coincidentally from our program in London, 2 from Denmark, 1 from Australia, and 1 from Brazil. It was called Alessandro's Palace, and although it was cheap, it was definitely not a palace and so we spent every single minute of our two days in Rome wandering the streets and running into famous monuments and sculptures. We took the train to Florence (Firenze) afterwards and stayed with our friend Erin from LMU who is studying there. We saw the David at Academia, we ate lots of amazing food, and we even made friends with a couple from Minnesota who invited us to sit at their dinner table at "Yellow Bar" and bought us tons of house wine and entertained us with hilarious stories. From Florence we took a day trip to Santa Brigita in the Chianti region and went wine tasting at the Castello de Trebbio. Our tour guide Tatiana was by far the best person we met in Italy. A favorite quote from her (said as we were getting off the tour bus in Santa Brigita): "beautiful girls beautiful girls, so beautiful i could be your mother!" She had a thick Russian accent (although she claimed to be pure Italian) and had wild box dyed platinum blonde hair that was hastily thrown into a fountain-like ponytail on top of her head. She shamelessly flirted with our other tour guide Alberto and put the wrong emphasis on every single word she said. The wine tasting was too much fun. Katy and I were the youngest people there by far, and with the exception of two middle aged women traveling alone we were the only non married couple on the tour. We made friends with M. Night Shamalan's (again spelling?) assistant director who bought us and the two middle aged women an extra bottle of wine at the castle which we all shared together. We left Florence at 5am to take an early train that cost 10 euros less than all of the other alternatives and made our way to Venice. In Venice we stayed at an amazing little bed and breakfast. We walked so much in Venice that my feet actually had purple bruises on them and so we took it easy and read a lot of books in our bed. I finished Blink by Malcolm Gladwell and read two murder mysteries. Most notably- Katy read a trashy Italian romance novel and sobbed hysterically at the end. We were majorly low on cash so one of the nights we bought 2 euro bags of cookies and ate those for dinner and polished off the bottles of wine we bought our parents in Chianti that we found out were going to cost us a couple hundred euros to send to the US. On our last day we had to check out of the hotel at 10am, but our flight out of Treviso airport wasn't until 11pm. So, we carted our suitcases around with us all day as we took a water taxi to Murano, the island famous for glass blown art. We were completely worn out and ready to go back to London by the time 11pm rolled around, and we were in a completely dejected mood because Ryan Air wouldn't let us fly with the bottles of olive oil that we bought in Florence. Katy bought a panini and tried to eat as much of her olive oil as possible before we had to go through security, and she tried to make me take shots of mine. Our Ryan Air flight was suprisingly uneventful on our way home and we made it back to our beds in London by 2am. It's good to be home :)
Italy 2
Gypsy in Florence
Family in Florence
Nun outside the Colloseum
stalker shot on the train from Rome to Florence
Italy 1
Duomo in Florence
Colloseum (spelling?) in Rome
Man outside a cafe on our first morning in Rome
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