Germany: Stuttgart, Villingen. Italy: Rome

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So an opportunity presented itself for Ali and I to take a trip to Germany to visit her cousin and his girlfriend, and stay with his girlfriend in her house for free. We have a four day weekend approaching, so we figured "why not?" She lives in a small midieval town called "Villingen" which is about 60 miles southwest of Stuttgart. Everything looked great for us to fly out on Thursday the 6th and return the 9th, so we booked the tickets. It wasn't until I was reading the confirmation e-mail that I realized we accidentally booked the flight to leave on FRIDAY instead of THURSDAY. Well, for the price we paid, we figured only 1 full day in Germany wouldn't be adequate. Quite upset, I phoned the AirBerlin customer service line, and luckily the guy was really nice, and let us rebook the flight to Thursday free of charge. We just had to pay the difference in tickets, which was a bit of money but not unbearable. Then, yesterday I was reviewing the newly revised itinerary to e-mail Ali's cousin (they are picking us up in a Peuogot and driving on the Autobahn!!), and noticed something rather strange...THERE WAS NO RETURN DATE!?!?! We swore we had seen that Sunday was highlighted as the return date. But when I returned to the AirBerlin site and put in our travel dates to see what could have gone wrong, I realized that what we thought to have been a confirmation of the sunday return date was actually a "NOT AVAILABLE" highlight. ARGH! So I decided to go onto some various European flight search engines, and the lowest fare I could find to return on Sunday was 160 EUROS!!! "Not a chance," I told myself. I then decided I would run a search on this awesome site called skyscanner.net that lets you pick and choose cheap dates from a calander form. I put Stuttgart as the departure city, and left the arrival city open to any city of any country in europe to see where we could possibly go. Hmmm...Germany came up as the cheapest...but I thought, "no, we'll already be in Germany." So I looked to see what the next cheapest country to fly into was and it was ITALY!!! Yes! What a grand idea! It was really cheap to fly from Germany to Italy, and I knew it's always cheap to fly between Spain and Italy, and sure enough, I was able to find TWO tickets (one from germany to italy and the other from italy to germany) for WAY cheaper than to fly germany to spain. So we're taking a couple days off of work and spending Sunday through Tuesday in ROME!! Yay!!! I can hardly wait. Be expecting many many pictures!! So I'll be gone from Thursday the 6th to Tuesday the 11th in a peculiar and random journey to the heart of ancient europe. Hmm...we'll see how this goes. We did lose some money from the whole plane ticket misunderstanding, but what the heck, it'll be a chance to see 2 european countries and only miss 2 days of work.
After booking the tickets I searched Rome for cheap places to stay, and I found a really cheap youth hostel (dormitory hotel) for only 18 euros a night for a bed. Plus they have their own cafe, free baggage lockers, internet, phone service, and it's a good opportunity to meet and hang out with people from other parts of the world. I'm young, right?
Well, I'm excited to eat REAL italian food in a REAL italian restaurant, and experience its amazingness!
Nothing is planned for this weekend, probably because I can't spend any money. This month is pretty tight with the constant holidays, and me going to Germany, Italy, and Morrocco. But I'll manage :-)
Dave

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