Italy Part 3

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Day 8 We left Rome for Villa San Giovanni (the toe of Italy’s boot) at 7.45am and arrived at 2pm. For this part of the journey I hadn’t planned every detail like I had for the rest of the trip - BIG MISTAKE! Maybe a map would have helped. So, we arrive at Villa San Giovanni and start to head for the ferry. I presumed that along the ramp to the ferry somewhere we would be able to purchase tickets. Wrong. We get to the gates and ask the ticket guy where we can buy tickets. After a few minutes of hand gestures and pointing he gives up and waves us onto the ferry with no ticket. Not wanting to waste such a great opportunity we stride onto the ferry without even knowing whether it’s the right one and where it is going to take us. I start to stress out. We ask a few Italians where we are going, but no English is spoken, and they point towards the island in the distance. Fingers were crossed at this point.
The ferry trip lasts about 20mins and the scenery is absolutely stunning. The water is so blue. I don’t think photos would do it justice.
We arrive at Messina, where we wanted to be ☺, and immediately start to look for a bus to take us to the capital of Sicily, Palermo. I estimate that the trip should roughly take us 30mins. Wrong again. The only transport we can find is a train that should take about 3 hours. We hop on it. During the trip we see signs that tell us the train is 1 hour delayed. Fun fun. We know why - the train stops every 4 mins then waits at each stop for about 6mins. Why???? Only 1 or 2 people get on or off. So, our train that should take 3 hours and now takes 4 hours, somehow manages to arrive 5 hours late. I don’t know what happened with the train but Andrew and I were in hysterics with laughter. We must have been a little over tired after travelling for 13hrs. So again with no map - dang, we navigated the streets of Palermo and discovered that our hostel was situated on a pumping laneway/alley full of nightclubs and discos. We dumped our stuff. Ate ice cream for dinner. Wandered through some of the night markets and then plonked into bed with extremely loud techno music pumping, extreme heat, extreme mozzies, and our room mates extreme smelling feet. It was a great day (seriously - no sarcasm intended).

Day 9 So after our travel experience the day before we decided to organise our travel back to Villa San Giovanni early in the day. We had already booked our train leaving Villa San Giovanni for 8am the next morning. We got up and started out for the train station. We made a slight detour through some amazing food markets selling very cheap fruit and vegies, heaps of seafood and hanging meat (we saw pigs inside out!). We got to the station and asked what train we could catch to San Giovanni that would arrive before 8am. Surprise, Surprise - not a single train can get us there - not even if we leave at 4am. So we head to the bus station to suss out the situation. The buses are cheaper, and are much quicker - but don’t arrive by 8am. So now we are stuck. We head back to the hostel, grab our train tickets and power back to the station. We get a refund on our train tickets - minus 20%, because the only way we could have caught that train was if we left in a couple of hours and slept at the San Giovanni station (we decided this wasn’t a good idea!). So now we had to find a way to get to Rome. We found a bus company that would take us all the way to Rome, it was cheaper than the train but left at 7.30pm that day. We took it.
So back again down our favourite street again to the hostel. We got to the hostel and tried to cancel our accommodation for the night but they wouldn’t give us a refund as we didn’t give 24hrs notice.
We wandered the streets for a while. Palermo really is quite an amazing place. The streets all look dirty; in fact some lanes are completely littered with trash. There are dogs everywhere and when we first arrived we saw one lying down - I was convinced it was dead. Every laneway turns into a market that sells everything, we went down one lane and there were hundreds of light shades, the next lane sold sheets and the next had food again. It looked pretty dirty and pretty run down, but it had such a great atmosphere. It was fun wherever we went, the markets were buzzing and the people were very relaxed and having fun. I would love to go back sometime. After cruising for a while, we grabbed some late lunch, found some snacks for the trip and headed for the bus station.
Would you believe that the bus only took us 2 and a half hours to cross the island, NOT 5!


Day 10 We arrived in Rome at about 8am after very little sleep on our overnight double decker bus. We headed straight for the train station, caught a local train and then boarded our train to Florence. We arrived in Florence at about 12pm and started off for our hostel - once again without a map. We found the hostel about 20mins later after a few wrong turns. We headed straight out to explore and get an ice cream. The ice cream in Italy is the BEST ice cream ever.
We walked through many very pretty lanes and piazzas, before we found the river. We watched some local Italians playing soccer next to the water. They were really hamming it up for the crowd of tourists. They were really fit, wearing no tops and showing off their muscles to everyone watching. It was very funny as the ball went in the water twice in about 10 mins. The 1st time one of the guys nearly fell in trying to get it out again, and the 2nd time they needed a canoe to fetch it. It was pretty funny. We then walked over to the nearby bridge to watch the sun setting it was very beautiful.

Day 11 After getting into the free breakfast, and then stealing anything else left on the table for snacks during the day, we head off to the Galleria dell' Academia. We decided that because it was basically our last day in Italy, and we had a little money left, we thought we would shout ourselves into the museum to see Michelangelo’s ‘David’. At this point in our travels, the only other entrance fee we had paid was to get into the Vatican City - tight-as budget. We were really glad we saw the real ‘David’ and other works by Michelangelo, there was a copy of ‘David’ in Palazzo Vecchio where we were able to take photos, but not as good.
After the Museum we cruised around the streets for a while, then ate some Indian food at a dodgy cheap kebab shop.
We headed to the train station to ask at information if they could confirm what time our train was leaving the next morning, as the ticket we had hadn’t printed out a time on it when we bought it - all our other tickets had times on them. The ticket ladies response to this query was “You buy a ticket, you don’t know what it is. That’s the problem”, we couldn’t hold in our laughter.
We left the station and took a quick look at our funds - and discovered we had only 76 cents left. We are not quite sure how that happened. We headed for a bank to get 20 Euro out. After trying at 4 different ATM’s and between us using about 5 bankcards, discovered that we couldn’t withdraw a cent! We had no idea what to do. We sat down and searched all our pockets for any extra money, and came up with nothing. We were a bit worried, but really we thought it was all pretty funny. About an hour later Andrew miraculously found a 5 Euro note in his wallet that we had previously searched - a miracle (thanks Johnny Paul). You wouldn’t believe what we were able to buy with this 5 Euro. I sent Andrew into a 99cent shop expecting him to come back with a loaf of bread and some biscuits that would hopefully last us for dinner, and then get us home to Salzburg the next day. He appeared at the checkout with a basket! Spending just 5 Euro Andrew bought the biggest pack of salada biscuits ever (containing approx 25 small packets inside), 2 small bread rolls, a packet of smartie biscuits, 2 1.5 L bottles of water, a can of coke and 2 packets of apple and berry mini strudels!

Day 12 We got up very early to catch our 1st train from Florence to another train station in Florence, then caught our 2nd train at about 6.30am to Bologna. This was a bad train; the train was packed and smelt pretty bad. We had to sit in the aisle on tiny little chairs with people all around us standing or sitting on their bags. This was the only time in Italy that we felt really squished, all the other trains we caught in Italy were very good. We hoped off after about 2 hours, waited in Bologna for about an hour and then grabbed our 3rd train to Venice. We arrived in Venice a couple of hours later, and here we were finally able to get some money out of an ATM. We waited at the station for a few hours before hoping on a train to Villach, Austria at 3pm and our 5th train for the day, back to Salzburg.

We had a great time and cant wait to go back. The end.

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Photos

Palermo Markets, Sicily
Anyone need a lamp shade?

Palermo, Sicily
Stylin'

Piazza della Signoria Florence, Italy
Imitation David

Florence, Italy
Life Of John the Baptist door

Covering up in Church, Florence
The new craze in Italy

Florence, Italy
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Home Again, Salzburg
This is all we took