Memoirs of Italy

So after a full week in Italy, I definitely have a lot to report. Sorry it took so long to put this together, but I had a lot of schoolwork this past week. Nonetheless, I had a great time and really like Italy, probably more than I do Spain. I guess it is unfortunate that I don't speak Italian and that the language is a lot less useful than Spanish is. Overall my trip was filled with a lot of a few things: walking like I never have before, great Italian food, great Italian wine, lots of pictures, and spending a lot of time looking at maps trying to get un-lost. And of course a lot of fun and unforgettable sites!

I spent my final night in Pisa with my roomates in my hostel. This was most definitely an interesting experience for me. I was lonely because I didn’t have Dan to hang out with yet (my friend from my program in Alicante who also goes to Georgetown), but I spent the time by hanging out with some new “friends” from my hostel. My roommate, quite the interesting character, was a 21-year-old stripper from Australia who had two kids. She wasn’t the most intelligent person, but she provided for some entertainment. I actually ate some pizza with her and another guy in our hostel who was from Amsterdam, and in any case, a more interesting person. Some of our other neighbors were around too and we stayed up rather late just talking and sharing travel stories. There really isn't a lot else to Pisa other than the tower so this is what we were left doing. Thankfully I left the next morning for Florence, but before I start there, let me include some pictures of the leaning tower!



I got on my train around 10am to arrive in Florence only an 1 ½ later. The problem was that my phone was not working and I had no idea how to contact Dan. I had the address of Dan’s friend’s apartment where we were staying for the night, but I wasn’t sure about how far away it was so I didn’t want to get into a taxi. I decided instead to figure out the public bus system and go to the landmark I knew it was close to. Finding the bus alone took my probably over an hour and that became a bit of a fiasco. Upon getting to the landmark I found a taxi to take me to the apartment, but upon arrival, I had no way to enter the building nor was I sure even what the name of Dan’s friend was. I sat outside on the curb for 30 minutes hoping Dan might just walk out, but I decided instead an internet café was what I needed. I am so glad Dan and I think alike! He sent me his mobile number so I was able to call from a really expensive pay phone and meet him back on the street to let me in. And this was just in the morning…

The first day in Florence was jam packed from then on. I put my suitcase down and we went right to the site seeing. We went to a local sandwich shop for a late lunch where apparently the 1000s of American exchange students in Florence really like to go to. I can understand why they would after eating this sandwich! From there we went right to the Duomo, Florence’s most notable (largest) landmark right in the middle of the city. The Duomo is a huge cathedral which is also surrounded by a baptistery and a clock tower. Inside is a lovely painted ceiling and you can climb to the top of it to get a great view of the city. Some 500 steps later, quite exhausted, we reached the top of the Duomo to check out our surroundings. It was beautiful! Some pictures for you:

After the Duomo we took a walk around and headed for the Ponte Vechio, Florence's most famous and oldest bridge. We got some great shots of the Arno (the river that runs through Venice) and took a walk over to the other side of town.


At this point it was getting to be later in the day and we heard from Dan's friend that there was a great spot to view the sunsetting over Florence if you walked up a bit to the Piazza del Michaelangelo. We headed off in this direction, getting a bit lost in some small little streets, but reaching the plaza just a few moments before the sun began to go down. More pictures:



We walked back to Dan's friends apartment, hungry and tired, to investigate where we could get some quality Italian food for dinner. She suggested to us a great hole-in-the-wall restaurant where I got some great pasta with chicken in a cream sauce. Soooo good. She also suggested a good rule to us: Only eat where the menu is given only in Italian. After not following this rule once or twice later in our trip, we came to regret our choice. We headed back to sleep after this after our long day to prepare for the next.

We awoke early to try to make a reservation at the Ufizzi museum, but ended up getting on the incorrect bus and arriving too late to make a reservation. Dan was quite disappointed, but this kind of art really isn't my thing for the most part so I was alright with saving my $15 euros for something different. We nonetheless went to make a reservation at Academic (where they have the original David) for the next day before going to grab some pastries and cafe to start our day.

This is the outside of the Ufizzi...

While we were eating we received a call from the other Georgetown kids who are studying at Florence for the semester. I guess I haven't previously mentioned that Georgetown owns a Villa in Florence where every semester they send students to basically live the life of your dreams. They stay in this beautiful villa with two full time maids and two full time chefs. It is a 20 minute bus ride outside the city, overlooking all of Florence from their front patio. They've even got statues and fountains of their own! They told us that we could come up to eat lunch with them so we figured out what bus we needed and headed right up. We met up with friends there (one of the girls who I went to Tanzania with this summer and another girl who I will be living together with senior year) and we got a free three course lunch with wine! Afterwards they gave us a tour of the villa and allowed us to use their free wireless while we just hung out and talked.






not bad, eh?

We left a little while later and went to see the Leather School in town with one of the other Georgetown girls. You can walk right through part of the leather workshop and then browse about through all of the products. There were a lot of really beautiful purses, but I worked hard to resist! Nearby is the most popular gelateria in Florence, and it definitely lived up to our expectations. We went to have our first taste this day and all enjoyed it enough to want to go back the next day.

We walked around some more and made plans to meet up again with the other students when they finished class to have dinner together. We searched to find a restaurant to our liking but ended up at one that had some nice ambiance, but a menu in three languages. Although it wasn't terrible, it didn't live up to the price tag. Nonetheless, the company was enough to make the night a success. It was quite surreal being in Italy with some of my good friends from back in the states. One of my good friends there described it as "two of her world's colliding." I concurred.
We had a really fun night with all of them!

We unfortunately couldn't stay with Dan's friend for the entire three nights so we switched to a hostel for the final two. It was a bit hard to find and ended up being more like an apartment that they rented out to visitors, but it was in the middle of town, really nice, and it was only 25Euros a night! That next morning we had our reservation for Academia. For the most part, it wasn't the most interesting museum I've ever seen. Lots of really old paintings, lots of Jesuses and Madonnas. Nonetheless, the real David is there so I felt like I had to see it. It was quite the breathtaking sculpture, much bigger than I ever realized it was. There were a ton of tourists and you are not supposed to take pictures, but i managed to sneak one really quick!

I actually heard one of the funniest conversations ever while I was standing next to 'David.' This old British couple was walking by me as I was checking the sculpture out and the old man goes to tap his wife on the shoulder and asks her in the most perfect British accent "Sweetheart, is David circumcised?" I wanted to crack up out loud, but I did not want to be rude. They went on to have a good 5 minute conversation on the topic.

That afternoon we went for a quick lunch and then met up with another kid from our program here in Alicante who was in Florence. The three of us were planning to go to this big park, but we got there and found out it was 9 Euros just to enter so we decided against it. We headed over to Santa Croce, a huge church in Venice where they have the tombs of some very famous people. The church itself was quite beautiful and it was just as interesting as any museum. Fotos:

I am that little tiny person in front of the doors right there!

Santa Croce

in front of the tomb of Michaelangelo

Machiavelli!

Later that day we did some touristy shopping in the area and just had dinner and hung out for the evening. It was this night that I got the very unfortunate news from home that my Aunt Blanche had a heart attack and was in the hospital. I was of course really upset and unable to talk to my mom because my phone wasn't working, but now she is better and living with us and I think she will be just fine. Nonetheless, keep her in your thoughts.

That next morning was our train to Venice. We were nice and early arriving to the train station and everything was going fine. We printed our tickets and were waiting for it to come up on the schedule and for some reason our train wasn't there. At this point our train was supposed to be leaving in 25 minutes. Dan took another look at our tickets and realized that we were actually leaving from the other train station in town, the small one, that was on the completely opposite side of Florence. We both sprinted outside with our suitcases to franticly find a taxi in the hope that we might make it. Of course the taxi queue had at least 30 people in it so Dan just ran to the front of the line and starting begging people to let us go before them. A few people pretended like they didn't understand us (they said they only spoke Italian and wouldn't let us go) but then another english-speaking man came up and let us go next, thank god. We jumped in and told the driver to go really quickly, which he certainly did. We ran into the station and made our train with about 3 minutes to spare. It made for an unexpectantly stressfsul morning, but we made it to Venice and everything turned out alright.

In Venice we had some trouble finding accommodations so we ended up staying at a "campsite"/hostel that was a bit outside the city. We had to take a bus and it was farther than we thought, but for how cheap it was, we really couldn't have done better. We were in a little camper thing and it was actually quite hilarious. It looked like this:

We headed right into the city on Thursday when we arrived and it was really cool. It was completely unlike any other place that I have been, although it would not be that enjoyable to anyone who did not like boats. If you don't know anything about Venice, it doesn't have roads - it has canals. You get around the city mostly by walking and crossing bridges, but the grand canal that cuts through the middle of the city has a big boat that runs up and down to get you from one end of the city to the other. It's called the Vapareto. We took our first Vapareto ride to get down to the main attraction, St. Mark's Plaza to go and meet up with Andrew, another student in our program who was staying in Venice while we were. Let me post some pictures of the Grand Canal that we took on our various trips on the Vaparetto:




a big open air market along the canal
The Rialto, Venice's oldest bridge

another of the Rialto from further away
Venetian firefighters on the water!

That day we really did nothing but walk the canals together and get lost, which is apparently one of the best things to do in Venice. It's REALLY easy to get lost. We got in pretty late so after a while we looked for a spot for some dinner. We found a cute area of town that had a lot of restaurants and picked out one that ended up being really great. It was only 10pm at this point, but we were already tired and there isn't much to do at night in Venice so we headed back to our hostel. We got a bit lost going home, accidentally taking the wrong bus, but we figured it out eventually. I guess that is part of the fun in being in a country where you don't know the language nor your way around. Thank god the bus driver knew where our hostel was...

The second day we started at the Peggy Guggenheim Museum which was quite awesome and I really liked it. She definitely picked out some weird pieces of art, but I think that makes it all the more interesting. Here are some pictures we took at the museum:





We spent the entire morning there and after went for lunch in this cute little plaza. After lunch came the Jewish Ghetto of Venice. It was interesting, especially since Andrew is jewish (or at least raised so). We walked for a while and you could definitely sense a difference in this part of the city. Our guide book said there are less than 50 Jews that are still living there, but I think we saw most of them that day. There are things written in Hebrew and kosher shops in the couple of surrounding blocks. In the main square there is a large Holocaust memorial and a office dedicated to Jewish culture. It made for a pretty fun afternoon.


After this we hoped on another Vapareto that took us outside the city a bit to another island. On the way there we passed by "Cimitero" island. If you can get the idea of what this word means in english, this island is the cemetery for apparently all the people that lived in Venice. Nonetheless, it looks really pretty from afar.

We rode the vapareto a bit further until we arrived at Murano, the island that is famous for it's glass. We had heard you can see glass-blowing shows for free, but we got there a bit too late and ended up at a glass museum instead. If you think it sounds boring.... you're right. Oh well. We saw lots of old glass and paid about $8 to do so. We did lots of browsing, got some gelato, and I ended up splurging on really cool glass clock. I proceeded to lose that clock at the restaurant we went to that night, but was very thankfully able to recover it the following morning. yay for nice waiters.

We headed back on the vapareto to the main part of Venice in search of some dinner. We were going to try to eat on the Grand Canal this night but everything is both over-priced and really touristy looking, which means we probably wouldn't have even ended up with anything decent to eat. We found another restaurant that was both cheap and delicious so we all left happy. Tonight we three were well rested and looking for something fun to do, but the unfortunate thing is that there really isn't much in Venice past 10pm. I say unfortunate because I really think the city is just beautiful at night, and of course more romantic. haha I really wanted to go on a gondola ride, which would have taken up the better part of an hour, but my two companions were both too cheap and too macho to understand the attraction. I guess I should mention that 50 minutes in a gondola will cost your group something around $120. We hung around a bit in one bar that we found, but it ended up just being another early night for us.

Venice at night:

The next day we had plans to go to the Dodge's Palace (Palazo Ducale) and St. Mark's Square. To get there I got to indulge, at least a little bit, my gondola desire by going across the Grand Canal on one. You can hop on a gondola on one side of the canal and go across it for 50 cents! It's actually quite a rush and I wish we had a chance to do it another time. I at least got a picture, but it didn't come out quite so ideally because the gondolier was sending a text message in the background!

The Palace was a ton of fun and it had a lot of really cool history. It was the palace where the Venetian Dodges, the person who served as the head of government, lived from somewhere around 1200 to 1850. It had huge rooms for various senates and courts and dignitary visits along with living rooms and bedrooms and the prison and torture chambers down in the basement. My favorite room had a gigantic world map across the entirety of it's four walls that showed how they thought the world looked hundreds of years ago and showed were Venetians had control in certain territories. I have a new found inspiration for a room where ever I end up living one day. =)

I've got lots of cool pictures from the Palace:

inside the main courtyard


The Golden Staircase

prison!
View from the bridge of sighs, where prisoners crossed on their way to jail.
where you dropped off letters if you wanted to rat on people who were doing something against the government's interests =)

After the palace we just spent some time shopping and being lazy, sitting around and checking out more of St. Mark's Square. That night we went out for dinner at a really cute sidewalk cafe where they even had two guys playing violin. That was unfortunately our last time in Venice! I have some more random pictures of canals and bridges that I don't want to forget to put in:







The next day we had a train back to Pisa where we arrived only really to stay the night to make our early flight the next morning back to Alicante. It was Sunday when we were in Pisa, and like Spain, a lot of stuff is closed on Sundays so there is nothing to do anyway. Dan hadn't seen the tower so we got up at sunrise on Monday and walked over to see it quickly before we hopped on the bus to the airport. My suitcase was overweight because we were flying on this super cheap airline that only allows something like 25-30 lbs so I had to carry on some of my clothes and belongings in a plastic bag, but regardless, we made it back to Alicante that Monday afternoon safe and sound and having had a great time.

This past week has been pretty hectic with school work and I've been a bit sick, but I had a pretty relaxing weekend here in Alicante and now that I that am done writing about my trip I am relieved also.

I think that means this is the end!