Italian adventures

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Well we have had an interesting last few days… I don’t have much time on the internet, but I’ll give a little summary of what we have done (and I won’t be able to post pictures yet, but I’ll try at some point). When we got to Rome (after 30 hours of traveling on train and ferry) we met up with the other six from our group that were in Rome at the Spanish Steps, so that was awesome and then we went out to dinner at a place called “Concordia” (how appropriate) with them. The next day we all met at the Vatican at 7am to start our 16 hour day of sight-seeing. We saw St. Peter’s, the Vatican museum, including the Sistine Chapel, the Coliseum, the Arch of Constatine, the Pantheon, the Trevi Fountain, and the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore, and then dinner and a couple gelato stops during the day. So it was a busy day, but we got a very good taste of Rome. The next morning we went the Roman Forum, the Palentino, the Circus Massimus, and the Piazza where you stick your hand in the stone lion’s mouth before getting on a train to Siena in the early afternoon. There was a little language barrier at the train station… We said that we wanted to go to Siena and the guy kept telling us to get on the train that went to Florence that left in like 5 minutes, so not having any other idea of what to do, we listened. It was the right one, we just had to switch trains to get to Siena, but no big deal. Then in Siena we didn’t have a place to stay so we were looking for the tourist information office, but it wasn’t in the train station like they normally are. So we had to get on a bus to go to the TI. That took over an hour because on the bus, the driver just randomly stopped at the end of a road and turned off the bus and we sat there for at least 20 minutes. Emily and I were so confused and we had no idea what to do. Luckily we ended up a the TI and they told us how to get to the hostel, which was a few miles out of town. We reluctantly got on another Siena bus. We met a girl named Alex on the bus who from Australia and going to the hostel as well, so that was nice. We talked to her on the bus for a little while and then actually ended up going out to dinner with her that night. She’s in college in Australia and has a break now, so she is backpacking through Italy for five weeks and trying to improve her Italian in the process. So that was really neat that we met her and got to talk to her quite a bit. Anyways, then this morning we got up early so we could see all the Siena sites before our train to Pisa. We found a walking tour that said it took half a day and we did that. We were done by 9:30am. So we walked around a little more and now we are just about to leave for Pisa!

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