Magical!!

Wow. What a week! After a low-key weekend being semi-sick, I went on a full-throttle trip to the Amalfi coast this weekend. And it was great!! Mind you I was still sick, so while most of my travel-mates went out and had (a little bit too much of) a good time at night, I zonked out at the hostel. But it was reeeeally ok, because this was possibly the nicest hostel ever, more like a nice hotel. The showers were great! So much better than the trickle we get in the villa :) But let me start at the top. We took an overnight train from Florence to Sorento on Thursday night.

After a not-so-comfortable but not-truly-horrendous ride there, we were stuck in the rain, at 5am, looking for a bus to take us from Sorento to Amalfi. Easier done than said. Well, kinda. We found the bus, but the station was closed so we couldn't buy tickets. However that's the nice thing about Italians. The bus driver told us that he didn't care whether we had tickets or not - he still got paid the same amount. So we hopped on and he took us about an hour away to Amalfi! This was to be our first of many free/discounted bus trips. We arrived in Amalfi around 7. Do you want to know what's open at 7 on a Friday in Italy? Not a whole heck of a lot. But we wandered around for a bit (reminder: in the rain, although it had slowed down to a thick drizzle) and found a cafe that would serve us.

We wandered out to the pier (in the rain), and decided to have a second breakfast (our first had only been cafe and cappuccinos), consisting of peanut butter, jelly, bread, crackers, cookies, nutella, Italian cake-type-things, and basically whatever else we had in our packs. It was marvelous!! We then had a mini-siesta out there.

I broke in my new shoes on this trip (this story goes with a deleted picture here, sorry). The tennies I brought with have fallen apart between calcio (soccer) and Cinque Terre, so I had to get some new ones. That's another thing I've discovered - I have abnormally large feet in Europe. I'm only like a 9.5, but in Euro sizes that's 41ish, and those just don't exist. This can be a good and a bad thing. Bad, because they don't have my size in a lot of shoes. When I was searching Coop for some shoes (Coop is like the Italian version of Walmart) I was about crying because I was going to end up paying over €70 for shoes, which is like $100, which I wasn't excited to budget for. However then I found the sale rack. Bingo! They had 41s all over the place! So I ended up getting a pair of nice Puma's over half off, at a mere €20, or about $30. Sweet! I quite like them :) I've also had to get a pair of flip-flops, because I overwear the pair I brought, and broke them. However the ones I bought are kinda weird and I'm not altogether used to walking in them - they've got a wooden type bottom and I think the strap/thong thing is too big. But there were €1 so it's all good :)

But back to this weekend. After a while we decided to get to our hostel, check in, clean up, and go from there. So we hopped on a bus for €1.40 that was supposed to be €15 for another 1.5hrs, and ended up in Salerno. Good choice. After a quick group nap, (yes I napped!) we went out for a reeeeally good, and reeeeally cheap dinner, and then hung out on the roof for a while playing cards.

Roof of our hostel during the day. Like I said, it was nice!

Saturday came one of the most amazing days ever. I was a little sketch at first. We were paying for a boat tour of Capri. It was a little pricey, but I started to get excited. The hostel gave us rides down to the marina, where we get on a little raft/boat (with a 250 horse power motor - I guess that's impressive? Or I have the specs wrong or something?Anyway it was FAST). It was the 12 of us, plus two Aussies, who turned out to be so much fun, and who we hung out with for the rest of our trip. We started off with a nice ride heading out to Capri. Luckily I sat in the front of the boat, because we went over some fun waves :)

Our first dip into the ocean, under a freshwater waterfall!! Once again I took my underwater camera, so as soon as I find a place to develop the film (ancient, right?) I'll get all those picture up.

This is an UNedited picture. The water really was that blue!! It was amazing!!!

Then came the fun part: CLIFF DIVING!!!! Of course I was the first one to scamper up the rock, and the first one to jump off - twice!!

My first jump off, I managed to pull off a 1.5 front tuck somersault. I don't really know how, but it was so great! Diana got a great picture of it too.

My second jump Amanda was supposed to jump with me... obviously she didn't. Still fun though

The famous Dolce & Gabbana ad picture

Very aggressive seagull. It freaked me out when I attempted to feed it. Not the smartest idea, I know.

Ok so here's a good story. In this set of pictures you can see the Champagne Grotto. The water spewing out above was super intense, and kept knocking us away. Andrea, our guide, took a few brave enough to go climb in through the hole to see it. First he demonstrated, because you have to time it right to not get torn up on the rocks if you got caught in the spray. It was super intense. Then he let the two guys try. Then Ryan got blown by the spray as he was trying to leave. And then Andrea wouldn't let Amanda or I go in. I'm not sure if he thought that it was too dangerous, or he thought girls couldn't handle it, or he regretted taking us over in the first place, but I was a little upset. I wanted to see the grotto! Oh well. It was still neat being tossed by the waves and the massive swells.

We get to the famous Blue Grotto. One of the natural wonders of the world. And the guide starts telling us the strategy of how to swim in. As you can see above, it's quite a small entrance. And less dangerously similar to the Champagne Grotto, the waves would crash against it, making it more dangerous. So we get all excited, jump off the boat, and enter the Grotto. A.M.A.Z.I.N.G. I've never seen anything like it. It almost looked like we were either swimming in windex, they had a neon blue light on the bottom of the floor, or something like that. Purely unvelievable.

So after a few minutes, well, more than a few of swimming around, we convinced Julian, who can't really swim, to come in on his floaty. That was comical. After safely getting everyone back to the boat, someone points out the sign on the wall of the blue grotto. If you can't read it, it says "IT IS STRICTLY FORBIDDEN TO SWIM IN THE BLUE GROTTO". Oops. I swear none of us had any idea. And Andrea didn't care. Typical Italian mentality, he just sent us on in! And I definitely can't say I regret it. AMAZING!!!!! And a good story :) We finished up the boat tour, and were taken back to the hostel by Andrea's Uncle. Yet another typical Italian move.

That night we went out to dinner with the Aussies, then had some more fun up on the roof. They were having a music festival/concert at our hostel, but the music wasn't exactly excellent. Oh well. The next morning we woke up early and took yet another free train ride (I forgot to mention the other two free train rides previous - the ticket office was never open!) to Pompeii. Pompeii was so cool! Laura Amanda and I decided to get the cheesy touristy audioguides to try and truly appreciate everything we were seeing, and it was worth it. We weren't always sure what we should listen to where, but we learned random facts and tidbits. Also, I guess I knew that Pompeii was an entire city, but it didn't hit me until we were there how actually big it is!

Old houses, with Mt Vesuvius in the background

The real fountain was missing, so I filled in

What our carcasses would look like if the lava buried us 2,000 years ago :)

One of the best-preserved amphitheaters or Roman Colosseum

Gladiator!!!

Real bodies (not us this time)

After a nice morning in Pompeii, we caught the local train to Napoli (Naples) and bought the cheapest ticket we could, a 5.5 hr trip back to Florence. Just like the night bus, it was Harry-Potter style with our own private compartments!!

And after waiting for half an hour for all of our cabs to arrive at the train station to take us home (we forgot that the Florence regional trains don't run on Sundays... oops) we arrived home. Julian called Hellen (our house mom type thing) and she saved dinner for us! We felt so lucky. This week's been pretty low-key so far. Monday classes, Tuesday we went in for RenArt and saw Michelangelo's David at the Academia. I had already been in to see it earlier (as students we get in free and often to the museums here - score!) but it amazes me every time. That, and it was fun to learn that Marriotti herself helped with the restoration, translated for the English restorers, and wrote all the placards in the museum herself. Seriously this woman is amazing. She's been in the news lately because she's publishing a book about the Mona Lisa and how she was Giovanni Medici's muse or something. It's got her all flustered :). I've got an Italian test today, then am bringing a few friends to meet up with my conversation partner and her friends tomorrow. I'm excited for that. Then this weekend should be pretty low key. I might take a day trip on Saturday, but Sunday I'm hoping to go to this open-air market Chestnut Festival. It's somewhere up in the mountains, and you get there by an old fashioned steam train! I don't much like chestnuts, but this just sounds fun. We'll see. Then next weekend is our fateful trip to Norway. We got the tickets, roundtrip for €15. Buuuut yesterday we realized that we still hadn't booked a place to stay. So we got to looking, and kinda freaked out. Scandinavia is expensive. Not only that, but there must be something going on in Oslo next weekend, because everywhere was full! Crazy! However I'm pretty excited about our solution. We found a cabin. Yes, a cabin. At a campground. I'm not sure what to expect, but I'm pretty sure we'll have lots of stories. I almost hope it snows :) Well, almost.

868

868. I have 868 pictures from Venice. 2 days, 868 pictures. Granted, I had two cameras there, and Laura had an absolute blast with my big camera, so there's a ton of pictures that are just completely random. I put a bunch on here, but if you want to see the rest they're on my google/picasa account Here.

There's a lot of pictures there, mostly of things and people, but some are so cool! So let's see. Before I start on Venice, I'll see if there's anything from last week. I guess the only interesting thing I did (wait a minute, I'm in Italy... I do interesting things all the time :)) was I joined the other art class on their trip to the Duomo Baptistry. That was cool. It was built on Roman foundations that can still be seen beneath the grates. There's so much history here! And with Mariotti at the helm, we learn it all. Story about Mariotti later in my post. A hint, I'm pretty sure she or her husband is in the Maffia. Pretty sure. We googled it. But that's to come.

So early Friday morning we left for Venice. The bus ride there was great in itself. Well at least the first half. The Pennines are gorgeous. The road is high up in the mountains, and so we drove half-way through the clouds through these green mountains with countryside villas, and it was just perfect. Funny how out of my 868 pictures I didn't get one of the mountains. Oh well. We finally got into Venice, and not 5 minutes in to our boat ride to Morano (the glass making island) our boat got pulled over. I think for speeding, but I'm not quite sure. This began our first experience with Venitian men in uniform. I don't know if it's something in the water or what, but all the policemen in Venice were amazingly good looking :)

St. Mark's Square

Alright, so the following pictures may require a bit of an explanation. We visited the glass blowers in Morano, and I have never been so amazed in such a short amount of time. First it was great when he just whipped out a glass vase in a minute. However then he started to work on his second one. We thought just another vase, but then he started pulling and twisting, and in 45 seconds, bam there was a horse!!

Yeah. Crazy.

St. Mark's!

The canal our hotel was on

View from another window of our hotel

Alright, so another situation that takes some explanation. And here's where Mariotti's maffia background comes in. We've realized that Mariotti is a wealth of information about history, art, architecture and such. However we've begun to notice that she pretty much always gets what she wants. For example, our Friday night in Venice. We all met outside St Mark's Cathedral per our instructions that night, and Mariotti informed us that we were going to get a private viewing. Impressive, right? It gets better. We enter this dark church, and she has us all sit in the center. She goes and talks to the Director. Next comes possibly the most holy experience of my life. Even if you weren't at all religious you would have been moved. In absolute silence for about 5 minutes, the director gradually turned on all the lights, one by one. It was just awe inspiring. The ceiling is completely made of gold, and seeing it in different lights was phenomenal.

And so after this great experience Mariotti gave us a bit more history, then in an off-hand manner, said "Now they don't normally do this, but let's see if they'll let us up to the alter" After a quick chat with the Director, there we were. And THEN we got to see the coolest thing ever. The director cranks this handle, and the altarpiece swings around to reveal this:
I'm fairly certain that you could feed all of Africa for a year just from all the gold, rubies, emeralds, diamonds, and millions of other precious gems on this mosaic. She made a similar agreement to get us down into the crypts. So cool!! We were all left in awe after this excursion.

We had a great dinner too. By the end of our meal we were the only ones left in the restaurant, so the staff (our waiter was super cute!!) started joking around with us and keeping us company. The chef Alberto was a riot. He insisted on getting pictures with all of us, kissing him.

We were fairly tired, so we went back and passed out (due to tiredness, not alcohol I swear!) We decided that we wanted to take full advantage of Venice while were here, so we woke up at 5:30 the next morning to watch the sun come up. Soooooooo worth it :)

The city was still asleep and fairly empty. It was almost eerie. But oh so great. It was fun to see the city wake up and come to life. Fun!

After breakfast and a tour with Mariotti of the Academia museum, we decided to wander and eventually head out to the Peggy Guggenheim modern art museum. And guess what, there was water in St. Mark's!! We were so excited!!

We started to wonder what it would be like if random tourists came and took pictures of our laundry...

I'm too scared to count how many pictures of canals I have

Overall one of the most amazing trips ever. We were all pretty tired on the bus ride home. Well that is until Laura and I started a dance party. This week has been great so far. Last night we went out for Julian's birthday, and I found some Danes!! They were here for school for a few days, and they were so excited to find out that I was Danish. They taught me how to properly say Aero, the island that Grandma's from, along with a lot of other words and phrases. I just thought it was great to find Danes in Italy. Who knew? We were going to head down to Sicily this weekend, but our €30 ticket jumped to €85, sooooo we're sticking around Florence. Perhaps we'll visit some little towns around here and explore some other parts of Florence. Vedremo! (We'll see!)

Cinque

So I am officially in love. Yes, it has finally happened. Ladies and gentlemen, Bruno has given us warm home-made peanut butter for the past two breakfasts. I will never eat Skippy ever again. I don't know why or how I'm so obsessed with this peanut butter. I don't even normally like chunky peanut butter. But this is just amazing. Usually breakfast consists of bread, jams, a natural (aka non-sweetened) honey, granola, true yogurt (aka sourcream like, non-sweatened), coffee and tea. Except for Sunday brunches when we get warm coffee cake and sometimes eggs. But this peanut butter has just blown me away. I thought you might like to know what truly makes my days, because yes, they now revolve around food :)

But anyway, let me tell you about my weekend at Cinque. Not Cinque Terre, we've definitely shortened it to Cinque. It's that intense. Unfortunately not cliff diving intense. They lied about the availablity of cliffs to dive off of. But all is definitely forgiven, as yesterday was one of the best days. It started out early, up at 5 to catch a 5:30 bus to Florence, to catch a 6:10 train to Spezia, to catch a train to Monterosso. We were a lively crowd on the bus.

Waiting for the train to Monterosso - Ashley2 and Tessa

We got to La Spezzia a little early, so we grabbed a cafe, then headed on to Monterosso. Technically I think you're supposed to start at Riomaggiore and go north/west, but we decided to start at Monterosso. The hikes between Monterosso and Vernazza and Conriglia are the most intense, so we figured we'd start out with the most energy.

Thank goodness we did. Those were super intense! I mean, maybe not super intense, but definitely not what I was expecting. These stairs just kept going and going, and going! Half way through I just had to stop because me knees couldn't take it any more. BUT it was 150% worth it. I mean, absolutely gorgeous. Once in a lifetime type thing. Except that I really want to come back, so more than once I guess. It was about 95 out, plus a backpack, so we kinda got sweaty and gross. But once again, totally worth it :)

At Corniglia, the third town, we decided to finally stop after the hard legs. We decided to have a siesta with some lunch. Cinque Terre is known for a few things: fresh anchovies, dry white wine, pesto and raisin wine. We couldn't find the rasin wine, but we did get some delicious white wine, along with some calzones and pizza. Now remember, these are authentic calzones and pizza, aka very good :) We then picked up another bottle of wine, and well, made good use of it. Not that I"m advertising drinking here, but somehow when we stopped to go swimming in the Mediterannean, we thought it would be a great idea to drink in the sea. It was... interesting. There's a decent swell, so you have to try to keep your footing on the smoothest, most slippery rocks. It's actually a bit comical and possibly dangerous to just get in and out of the water, much less stand out in it. But once again, such a great experience. We then laid in the sun for a bit, before finally throwing clothes back on and continuing our trek.

At Manarola and finally Riomaggiore we did Apertivi and a loooong delicious dinner. Great seafood. I got my favorite, gnocchi, with shrimp. But of course I'm growing up to be just like my mother, and tried everyone's dish. They were all fantastic :) Love you mom!

Alright. Now comes the fun part. After dinner, we went and bought our tickets back to Firenze. We saw that we had to take the train to Pisa, then transfer to get back to Firenze. So we decide to remain awake on the way to Pisa so that we dont' miss it. We get to Pisa and see that the connection won't arrive until 1:10. AM. It's 11ish. EF!!!! And that's when we saw the little symbol next to the Firenze sign that looked like a bus. Yeah. Turns out it was a bus. I mean seriously? Sucks! We decided that in these two hours in Pisa, we might as well go see the leaning tower, right? Well, we saw the tower. And it leaned. I can't say that any of us were as excited as perhaps we should have been. We were so ready to just be home! I mean we'd been up since 5, and had planned on being in bed by now. But it was still cool to go see. We also discovered that Pisa has quite a happening night life. I guess it's kind of a college town. There were people out everywhere! The piazza's were packed! So that was kinda (not) cool to wander through all dirty and disgusting in our hiking gear and backpacks. But whatever. We finally fought our way onto the bus - and I mean fought. 72 seats, +100 passengers. Yeah. This all the while looking out for several pickpockets there. Just what we wanted to deal with. But after a two hour bus ride, and a taxi ride back to the villa, we were finally home! After a quick shower I was asleep by 4. I thought of staying up the full 24 hours, but then quicky slapped myself. All in all quite the day. Sunday was spent doing a total of nothing. It was glorious :) Then yesterday was classes and soccer, and tons of reading. Today was a sight visit for Renaissance Art, so we went to the Duomo and looked at a couple of things. We just had our meeting about internships. Previous to this I had my heart set on an internship in the mayor's office, so that I could learn all about small italian town politics. However my Peace Corps recruiters have talked me in to working on my application skill set while I'm abroad. So instead of even working with little kids, I'm now signed up to tutor high school students. Yippee. Not gonna lie, I feel a little bit intimidated. But it should be good. And fun. And very, very insightful. I'm also going to sign up for a conversation partner so I can work on my Italian. And make new friends. You can always do with another friend, right? Lol. This weekend is our Venice class trip, so more stories to come!