Weekend #13: Italy

Last weekend I went to Pisa, Florence, and Venice. Florence was kind of an accident; the lady at the train station gave us train reservations for a later train than we were wanting, so we ended up having about an hour and a half in Florence.

We left Thursday night and took a train to Mulhouse, France, where we had a 6 hour layover from midnight to 6am. We were prepared for the layover to be miserable, because any layover during those hours is usually awful, but we were actually able to stay on the train all night. The cleaning guy just said to us "I didn't see you." So we weren't really supposed to be there, but he didn't care.

That meant that we had 6 hours with an entire train to ourselves, so we had some fun with it. We could have slept fairly well, but we ended up playing on the tracks and the rest of the train for a few hours first.

We slept for maybe 2 or 2 1/2 hours, but it was a fun night. Then we took a couple of trains and arrived in Pisa around 4pm Friday. We found our hostel, dropped off our stuff, showered, and then headed out to find the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Then we just took a bunch of silly photos with the tower, and decided to go up it to the top, which was pretty weird walking on slanted stairs.

There were a bunch of guys around on the street selling stuff, like watches, sunglasses, and purses. We ended up buying some stuff from them for pretty cheap, then laid in the grass for about half an hour just soaking up some sun.

Being in Italy, we knew we had to eat pizza, so we found a pizza place and each ordered the 4.50 euro cheese pizza, the cheapest thing on the menu. It was pretty delicious.

We went back to the tower when it was dark, hoping that it would be lit up, but there were just spotlights on it. We did see a bride getting pictures taken by the tower. Over the course of the weekend, we actually saw 3 brides in 3 different Italian cities (Pisa, Florence, Venice) getting pictures done.

After that we just headed back to the hostel, since there isn't much nightlife in Pisa. We met some girls at the hostel and played cards with them for a while, then went to sleep.

Saturday morning we got up early to catch a train to Venice. We ended up with the layover in Florence, though, so we decided to make the most of it and walk around the city. Florence is pretty small; we found a place selling post cards so we could look and see what the big things to see were, and I think we saw all of them while we were there. It was a pretty place, and we saw bride #2 during our exploration.

We left Florence and took our train to Venice. Venice is mainly an island, but we were staying on the mainland to save some money, so we were actually a bus ride away from the real Venice. But we got to stay in a hotel instead of a hostel, so that was nice. We found our hotel and then caught the bus to the island, where we got dropped off right at the Grand Canal. Immediately we hit up a gelato place for our first taste of real Italian gelato, and ate it by the canal. It was pretty incredible. Then we just walked around Venice for the rest of the afternoon, exploring the little narrow streets. We saw the Rialto Bridge and watched the sunset over the canals. 

We actually got lost for a while, and finding your way through those streets is really tough since half of them dead end. We followed a sign to where we wanted to go and thought we went the right way but it dead ended on a dock. But we eventually found our way back to civilization and found a place for dinner. We had already had pizza in Italy, so we went with spaghetti for our second meal. Then of course we had gelato for dessert.

We caught the 11pm bus back to the mainland and went back to the hotel to figure out trains back for the next day and to go to sleep. We were all pretty tired, and again, there wasn't much nightlife in Venice either. But it was nice getting 2 full nights sleep over a weekend.

Sunday we got up and headed back to the island for a little while before our train. We got gelato again (it was so good - mint chocolate chip, chocolate, and chocolate chip - perfect combination) and found a pizza place to get pizza to-go for the train. We actually caught a train from the island instead of going back to the station we arrived at. Then we had about a 7 hour train ride to Munich.

We had a 2 hour layover in Munich, so we went and found Wombats, the hostel we stayed at when we were in Munich. They have this little "zen garden" with couches and hammocks, so we hung out there for a while before catching our overnight train back to Metz. We realized that our train reservation was actually for the next day for some reason, so we were a little worried they'd make us get new reservations, but it was no problem. We just found an empty cart and no one kicked us out. I didn't sleep much on the overnight train, but we got back to Metz around 6:15am Monday morning.

Italy was gorgeous, and it was actually warm, which we were excited about. I wore dresses all weekend since I forgot to bring any shorts to Europe. It was a really relaxing weekend. Hopefully I'll make it to Rome after finals, so I can go back to Italy one more time.

I leave this Thursday night for Croatia! And 2 weeks until my birthday. :)