Oh The Places We’ll Go

We left Florence reluctantly yesterday after having a great time relaxing and seeing the sights around town, getting used to the laid back pace we hadn’t seen while we were in Rome.  Our entire experience there was amazing- great hostel, great people, great food… we already miss it there.  After waking up at around 7 to get our things together, we took our last stroll through Florence before arriving at the Firenze train station to board our Eurostar train to Venice.  One thing we’ve noticed about Italy are that there are McDonalds EVERYWHERE, in every train station, in every city we’ve seen so far.  It’s almost a bit sad- here we are in Italy having McDonalds McMuffins for breakfast when we should be eating Italian food for breakfast.  Italian breakfasts are coffee, though, so it’s better to have something than nothing at all.

The train ride was fine through Bologna and into Venice.  That’s when things got really interesting.  We got into the Venice San Lucia train station around 2 yesterday afternoon and after wandering around for 20 minutes confused and extremely frustrated (not to mention hot), we figured out that our hotel was on the MAINLAND in Venice and not in VENICE venice, if that makes any sense.  See, there’s a difference between Venice mainland and Venice the island of Venice, since it takes about a 10 minute regional train ride to get between the two.  To get back to the mainland, we hopped on a metro train for about €2 and finally figured out what our directions were telling us to do.  It was much easier, obviously, since we were taking the directions from the right train station and all.  Haha.

500 meters later, and a lot of sweat and frustration, we made it to our hotel on mainland Venice.  Let me be the first to say- this hotel is SHADY.  It’s in the middle of this residential street with no one around, like a ghost town and the walk under the passageway to get to and from the Mestre train station is hella creepy.  Lots of graffiti, lots of weird smells, just all around a very very weird place.

One thing about Italy that I had heard about, but not really seen yet, was that during the month of August many people leave the cities in Italy to go and vacation elsewhere.  Thus, many hotels, restaurants, and shops are closed down because everyone is gone.  On the mainland in Venice, everything is closed down.  Everything.  Last night we wandered around for almost an hour trying to find a single restaurant that was open, walking down these shady, dirty streets in the middle of nowhere.  Imagine downtown Oakland, but a million times worse.  And empty.  We finally found a little pizzeria near the Mestre station that was open, and I don’t think either of us have ever been so happy just to see a pizza place in our entire lives.  Let’s just say our stay in Venice hasn’t been off to a great start.

Our plan for today is to wander around the Grand Canal here on the island before heading to Milan tomorrow.  Our original plan was to go from Milan to Nice, but since everything in Nice is so expensive, all the hostels and the hotels, most likely we are going to go straight from Milan to Barcelona instead of stopping in the south of France.  It sucks, but that’s the way things go sometimes.  At least that will give us an extra couple of days in the UK to travel around, so it’s not completely disappointing.

On a completely unrelated note, I can’t believe we’ve only been in Europe for 6 days.  7 days?  Whatever.  Time here seems like it goes so slow.  Maybe that’s because all we do is walk around, look, talk to each other, eat, and sleep.  We’ve seen so much and been so many places, you’d think it would be taking a lot longer than it has been.  The UK seems so far away right now, and as much as we love seeing everything here in Italy, I think both of us see London as the peak of our travels around here.  Going pub hopping, watching football, and being in a country where people speak the same language as us.  While I think both of us enjoy the fact that we’re doing this together, looking around and exploring everything, it gets to be tiresome and lonely.

More than anything, though, Venice has worn us down.  Getting lost, being hot and sweaty, it doesn’t really make either of us want to jump up when we wake up in the morning.  I’m sure for a lot of people, Venice could be the pinnacle, the peak of their entire journey here in Europe, but for us we’re hoping that there’s a lot more out in the world than this.

I’m going to keep trying to find a place to put up our pictures from our travels here.  I haven’t been able to find anything yet, but hopefully sooner than later I’ll be able to post something.

Until next time, Ciao.

Thomas and I have had a great stay in Florence so far and we’re almost sad to be leaving tomorrow.  The city here is our kind of style- small and quaint, but still has a lot of heart and soul.  It may not be the biggest city in Italy, but to us Florence has a lot more of the Italian spectacle and magic than Rome ever had.

Yesterday, after we had a chance to sit down yesterday and just relax after our long walk and expedition trying to find out hostel, Thomas and I made it over to the Uffizi art gallery to check out the different works of art in Florence’s most famous Italian art gallery.  The most famous work at the Uffizi Gallery, ‘The Birth of Venus’, is an absolute spectacle and is absolutely breathtaking to see in person.  Besides that, though, we found the Uffizi gallery to be a bit of a disappointment.  Other than the ‘Birth of Venus’ most of the other art in the gallery is medieval religious art from around the 1400’s, which after a while all starts to blend together and can be a bit of a bore.

Our adventures today, however, were much more exciting.  After sleeping for what must have been 12 hours last night, we got on and walking around Florence around 10:30 this morning before making reservations on a train to Venice tomorrow.  After we took care of the reservations, we made our way to the Accademia, which is most famous for Michelangelo’s ‘David’.  The line, while it was long, moved pretty quickly and before we knew it we were inside the museum staring up at one of the most famous sculptures in the world.

‘David’ is absolutely breathtaking.  You would think you’d be prepared for it, but the sight of it exceeds all expectations.  The sculpture itself is absolutely humongous.  It is probably about twice of my own height, and is on a pedestal which makes it even taller.  The details to the sculpture are what make it so incredible.  All of the veins, the muscles, the details of the hair and the features are all perfectly done so that even though you know it isn’t real, the attention to detail almost makes it seem as though it is.

After seeing ‘David’ we made it back to the hostel, hung out for a little while, and headed over to a little bar called Friends to watch the Community Shield match between Manchester United and Portsmouth.  Manchester United won on penalties, of course, but the fun part of watching the match was being around other football fans watching the match instead of it being just us watching the match at 4 in the morning in our PJ’s in Rocklin.  After a pint of Guinness, we met a family of Portsmouth fans from England who were here on vacation in Florence, so they bought us a pint of Harp while talking about Las Vegas, what people in Scotland are like, and other random things.

Typing right now, post-bar, is a little difficult.  After a couple of pints of beer, and a Long Island Iced Tea (which I’m sure has been the death of me), I’m probably what you would call drunk, so while I’m having a pretty good time writing this, getting the right keys in order has been a lot more difficult than it usually would be.

Tomorrow the plan is to get in to Venice and explore, since we’ll be there until the morning of the 13th before we move on to Milan.  I think we’ll both miss how beautiful and quaint Florence is, but hopefully Venice will be just as amazing. 

I’ll write more when I have the chance to update how life is in Venice.  I probably, after tonight, need to remind myself to lay off of the Guinness post-Manchester United victory but you’re only in Italy once, right?  I’m sure it will be a lot worse once I get to Scotland.  I’ve been warned that the Scottish drink like tanks so I’m in for a rude awakening.

Until next time- Ciao

We made it to Florence this morning after spending our last night hanging out with the British girls in Rome.  I must’ve woken up at like, 5 o’clock this morning before laying back down for another hour or so to relax before getting up and moving around, packing up our stuff and planning out the rest of our day.  We checked out of our hostel this morning around 9, put on our packs and made our last trip on the Metro in Rome to the Termini, where we waited around, had a McMuffin, and boarded our Eurostar train to Florence, which they call ‘Firenze’ here in Italy.  We sat next to these two old Italian people headed to Milan on the train, who understood NO english but we could tell they were friendly, nice people.

The ride to Florence is absolutely beautiful.  THIS is where the beauty in Italy comes from: the small towns, the fields, the little old houses in the middle of vineyards and rolling hills throughout the country.  No graffiti, no nonsense- just pure beauty.  The train ride lasted a little over an hour and a half into Florence, so after the train stopped Thomas and I got off and tried figuring out how to make it to our new hostel.  This hostel was a lot more difficult to find than our last one, especially since Florence doesn’t have a metro system since it’s much smaller than Rome.  We got on a bus like our hostel directions said, but even after we asked the bus driver if the stop we needed was on his line, he never told us WHAT stop we had to get off on.  So, after getting lost, Thomas and I walked with our packs on in the heat for well over 20 minutes before we found our hostel.

This hostel, the Soggiorno Pitti, is MUCH nicer than the one in Rome.  They have TV, which I said a ‘Halleilujah’ for, and we have our own room and bathroom in the hostel.  Turns out we have to share a bed, which is… whatever, it is what it is, we came from the same place so it’s not a big deal.  We got a chance to catch a little bit of the Olympics finally, since we haven’t seen any of it yet, so we watched a couple of swimming heats before getting our room.  We have a TV in our room, but it only has like, 10 channels and all of them (of course) are in Italian.  After settling in, we watched a little bit of MTV Italia, and their version of TRL was on.  It was pretty funny since all of the music videos for the Italian artists are SO BAD, but they still have at least a couple of American and British music videos on their countdown.  Randomly, the top 2 songs on their playlist were ‘Killing Me Softly’ by The Fugees and ‘When A Man Loves A Woman’ by Michael Bolton.  Random?  We thought so.

So our plan for tomorrow is to explore Florence since we’ve only got 1 day here to really look around, so I think we’re going to go and see the Galleria dell’Accademia where Michaelangelo’s David is, and the Uffizi Art Gallery where a lot of famous pieces of art are.  It’s going to be a busy busy day with a lot of walking but Florence is a small town so I doubt it’ll be too strenuous, especially since we don’t have to wear our packs everywhere.

I haven’t been able to put our pictures up on the internet yet, but when I have the chance I’ll try and show everyone what our travels have been like.

Ciao