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Published: September 28th 2011
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What an exciting couple of days we had this past weekend in Italy! On Friday we were luckily able to sleep in and we wandered over to our favorite sandwich place, The Oil Shoppe, and then met up with our friend Alyssa to visit the Boboli Gardens behind the Pitti Palace. We brought bread and cheese with us and expected to be able to relax in one of the few grassy areas in Florence. With our museum passes we purchased from the school we are able to get into both the Palace and the gardens for free and we walked through the palace and entered into the Garden. Unfortunately, although beautiful, the gardens are designed on sets of steep stairs and we only made it up the first set. There is plenty more to explore except we decided to wait until it gets a little cooler and we won't die of heat exhaustion on the walk up. We relaxed for a couple of hours and then walked around Florence for the rest of the day. We finally found the Jersey Shore house! Such an exciting find. Anna served a delicious dinner and we went out for a couple of drinks after.
On Saturday we woke up very early to get to Cinque Terre. Cinque Terre is a series of 5 small towns on the coast connected by trails. We had to take the train to Pisa and then another train to get there which surprisingly turned out to be pretty easy. We were dropped off in the first town Riomaggiore and walked down the Via dell'Amore (Walkway of Love) to reach the next town of Manarola. We learned later that it was called the Walkway of Love because before it was built, the residents of the towns were only able to marry within their own town because they couldn't reach anyone else. Once the walkway was built, the residents were able to meet their future husbands and wives from the different towns on the path. Currently, locks of love are locked all over the walkway and the walls are covered in hearts and initials.
We reached the second town of Manarola in less than 20 minutes and wandered around for a while. The towns of Cinque Terre literally look like they're straight out of movies. Once we decided to move onto the next town we realized we had to
take a train due to damage on the path from a landslide in 2010. We reached Corniglia very quickly and suddenly saw the giant staircase ahead of us, 365 stairs! We finally made it and were greeted by a congratulations sign at the top (little did we know what our next walk would be) We found a little gelato place where the owner sold us the shop's specialty, gelato with local honey, almonds, and lemon juice. It was just what we needed before the long walk we had ahead of us.
We started on the hike towards Vernazza and saw a sign that said that this 90 minute walk was challenging but definitely the most rewarding of the walks between the towns. The further we walked the more and more difficult it got. The stairs (if you can call them that) got steeper and in some places were so damaged that you had to look for places to step so that you wouldn't slip. We were definitely not prepared for this, I was wearing flip flops! However, the view was so pretty and it was somewhat breezy in comparison to Florence. We hiked along cliffs through olive trees and
finally saw the town of Vernazza, we had made it!
Vernazza was bigger than the other towns and we decided to buy some souvenirs. Me and Alyssa bought postcards and a winestopper and Kelly and Kristy bought interesting T-shirts. We ate dinner at a restaurant right on the water and watched the sunset.
By 7:00 we were ready to leave and made our way towards the train station. Unfortunately we read the sign wrong and missed our train and had to wait another hour for the next one, which then lead to us missing our train to Florence and waiting another hour after that. Luckily McDonalds was still open and we treated ourselves to the 1 euro menu. We arrived home in Florence around midnight.
On Sunday we went to Winetown, which is an annual 2-day event. People pay 15 euros and get a necklace that holds a wine glass and they can taste 6 different types of wine. There are Winetown stops all over the city and people make their way around sampling wine. We didn't feel like spending the 15 euro so we just went for the free food samples, which were quite delicious. We
tried out a new gelato place afterwards to switch things up a little and were happy with that decision, I'm not sure if it's better than our first favorite one yet so we'll have to go back. As we were eating our gelato we got caught in a terrible rainstorm and were stranded underneath an umbrella for at least 45 minutes. Later on, we went out to eat at a Mexican place on our street. Although the salsa was a little off, the rest of the food was pretty good considering it's Mexican food in Italy.
On Monday night I met up with Sarah at Santa Croce and we walked around and stumbled upon a crowd of people outside of Palazzo Vecchio. Apparently the Gucci Museum opened on Tuesday and they were having a party full of celebrities. There was a carpet outside and we joined the crowd of people to see if we could find any stars. We saw Anna Wintor, the head of Vogue, Camille Belle, and other Italian movie stars and fashion designers.
The rest of this week I've just been going to class for the most part. The work's starting to pick up a
little bit, not nearly as much as Bentley still though, and we have our second Italian quiz tomorrow. Tomorrow I need to study and plan on going to buy an electric water heater too so we can make tea and hot chocolate once it gets colder! On Friday we're going to Pisa and Lucca as a day trip and on Saturday we have our overnight field trip with all of the Bentley students. Another exciting weekend!
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