Italy: the land of sun and gelato

Hello there everyone! Yes, yes, I realize that it's been a little over 2 weeks since I posted on here, and I'm sorry about that! I spent 10 days in Italy from April 3-12 for my spring break and had a wonderful-albeit exhausting-time there. There is simply SO MUCH to see in Italy, and yet our group tried to tackle as much as we could in the time that we were there. We started out in Venice, then moved on to Florence (where we toured Florence and the surrounding countryside), then to Rome, and then we went to Salerno, which is on the Amalfi Coast. Once there, we all traveled to the town of Amalfi for a day, and a friend and I took the next day to see Pompeii. All we saw of Naples were the train station and the airport as we were leaving, but by then, none of us cared to sight-see anymore anyways and just wanted to get back. Unfortunately, we all returned to a chilly and rainy Prague, which was a huge disappointment after sunny and warm Italy.

I am going to be perfectly honest and say that when we left Italy, I didn't want to be returning to Prague. I wanted to be going back to the U.S. I know that the other girls in our group felt similarly, too. There's something about a long trip that makes you look forward to home, and now that we can all see the end of our time here in Prague rapidly approaching, it's an odd mixture of sadness that this amazing trip is coming to an end with an excitement to be heading back home. I think that my feelings of homesickness were very greatly compounded when I got bad news from home while in Italy about the health of two people very close to me. Never have I wanted to be home more than I did when I heard about that. But I am really looking forward to my Mom coming out here in a little over a week, and I know that I am going to have so much fun in these last 5 weeks I have here. Basically, I think that when I leave, I will be ready to go home to all those that I love, and while I will be sad to leave Prague, I will know that I lived my life fully while I was here, learned so much, and had amazing adventures!

Now, about my actual trip :-) Venice was incredibly beautiful, and everything that I ever imagined it to be. However, it's not the type of city that I could ever see myself staying in longer than a couple of days, because it was nothing but tourists as far as the eye could see. Which was fine for the day and a half that we were, but I felt like I got a lot out of the city in just that time. Venice is where the gelato tasted the best, and none of us could get over the fact that around every corner, there was another beautiful, windy canal snaking around an old, paint-chipped building with ivy tumbling down from the windows. It was such a romantic town. Our maps were largely useless there, as the roads never lasted long, soon turning into a dead end at another canal. The city is relatively small, though, and since it's on an island, you really can't ever get too lost. We were in Venice over Easter Sunday, and so we all went to church that morning at a small, local church near our hotel in the suburbs. Although the service was obviously all in Italian, it was still nice to be able to go to church on Easter. It made me miss my family, though!

Next, we were on to Florence. Our hostel in Florence was a joke, to be honest. I am struggling to find one good thing about it...ok, it had a good location near the train station. That's it. However, we were hardly there since we were out and about all the time, so it's really alright. Who needs hot water anyways? We were just lucky to get in there at all, because the night we checked in, the lady behind the counter informed us that she *oops* overbooked, and we didn't have a room. Although she first tried to get us to just leave to find a hostel she knew of (that was pricier than this one), we vehemently informed her that that was not our job. She spent over an hour calling other hostels with no luck, and she finally ended up giving us a room that was supposed to be filled by another group coming that night, but since it was almost midnight and we had arrived first (with a reservation and confirmation and a deposit paid), she gave us the room. We felt badly for the other group, but at this point, it was first-come, first-serve.

Florence was beautiful, although the majority of our exploring was in the countryside around Florence, rather than the city itself. Our second day there, we went to a small town called Greve, which is in the Chianti region of Tuscany. We shopped, went to a wine-tasting (my first!), and hiked around the hills. Basically, it was glorious. The rolling hills were ruggedly and wildly beautiful, and there was such a peaceful calm all around. It felt great to be outside of a city and experience such wide-open beauty. Our next adventure was to head to Rome. Unfortunately, our trip didn't start off on such a great foot. Our train ride to Rome involved all of us getting gypped for 5 euro each (although the conductor claimed he could've charged us 40 euro each) for not getting our train tickets validated, something we knew nothing about. He claimed that we could've used these tickets twice already to go between Florence and Rome since they didn't have a date stamped on it, and although we explained over and over again that the last 2 train conductors we'd already had in Italy hadn't brought this issue up, he was a completely jerk about it. Trust me folks, he pocketed our money for himself, and we all knew that, but he was very threatening and rude and angry despite our attempts at defusing the situation. Ah well. Then we barely made the last metro of the night when we arrived in Rome, and raced to get on the bus. Our bus driver then proceeded to only stop at the stops when someone pushed the "stop" button, and since we were relying on counting the number of stops in order to find our hostel's stop, we got lost. Past midnight. 6 girls with their backpacks wandering around completely lost in a sketchy neighborhood with our hostel not answering the phone. We finally found our hostel and thanked God repeatedly that we were safe.

As the proud history geek, I thought Rome was super amazing. The other girls weren't as fond of it, but I loved it. Plus, I'm a huge fan of Audrey Hepburn's "Roman Holiday", and I was excited to see all the sights from the movie. We went to the Vatican Museum, St. Peter's Square and Basilica, Trevi Fountain, the Spanish Steps, the Colosseum, Pantheon, the Castle of Angels, and many other things! Crammed it all in :-) My getting sick put a damper on Rome, though, and although my cold was only awful for 2 days (it's been an annoyance these past 2 weeks though), those 2 days were when we were in Rome. Therefore, we were all looking forward to relaxing on the Amalfi Coast. We were giddy with excitement when we saw the hotel that we'd booked. Since it was outside of the city center, we were able to get an actual hotel room for a great price. I mean, people, we had hot water, continental breakfast, our own room, a pool, and a clean bathroom! This was like heaven to us. College students don't ask for much. We took a ferry to Amalfi on Saturday, and none of us could stop snapping pictures. This was one of those places that lived up to all of the hype about how beautiful it was, and as we laid on the beach in our swimsuits soaking up the Mediterranean sun, I had one of those moments (I've had several of these since coming to Europe) where I just thought: studying abroad was the best idea ever. I looked around at our surroundings, tried to absorb the fact that we girls were sunbathing on the Mediterranean, and just turned to Madison and said, "Can you believe we're actually doing this??" We had a little pizza and wine picnic on the beach before we took a bus ride home that I feel lucky to have survived. The scenery was incredible, but the bus was taking these narrow, winding turns so fast, and there was nothing more than a 3-foot barrier along the cliff edges separating the road from a several hundred foot drop. Eek.

Natalie and I headed to Pompeii on Sunday, which was a really cool trip. We walked all over the place, oohing and aahing over these ancient ruins that were still kept intact. Only thing that wasn't fun was the fact that the roads were quite possibly the bumpiest I've ever walked on. And I thought that Prague was bad with its cobblestones. These were more like boulders in the road. It's so amazing to visit a place like this, because it's the kind of thing I studied about every year in history class growing up, and I never thought about the possibility of one day seeing some of those places in person, and here I am, doing exactly that! When we arrived back in Salerno, Natalie and I had the bright idea of "Hey, rather than waiting 2.5 hours for the bus that will take us back to our hotel, why don't we walk?" Two hours and 15 kilometers later, we realized how foolish of an idea this had been, but we made it. Never in my life have I ever been honked at so many times in my life as we walked back. In fact, the entire time we were on the coast, it was like that. And it wasn't just a car full of young guys or creepy old men, it was everyone. Of course, guys honked, but there were families and couples that would honk and yell "Ciao bella!" at us. I have yet to figure this out.

All in all, Italy was amazing, I ate like 8 gelato cones, as well as oh so much pasta and pizza and wine and delicious pastries. Every window we passed seemed to be filled with yet another tempting treat (and we often gave in to them). It was an exhausting trip too, though! So, having written this novel, I will say "Ciao" and hope that all of you are doing well :-)