My trip to Italy started off with some of the worst luck I've experienced in a very long time. It started a couple of weeks ago when we tried to buy our train italia tickets. Because flying into Milan was significantly cheaper than any other option, we had to take the train to Florence from Milan. One of the girls who I went with, Molly, accidentally bought our tickets for the wrong day and had to buy them twice. An honest mistake but a costly one. She ended up only being able to get a half refund and felt so bad about the whole situation that she didn't make us pay for the other half. This was the first bad luck we encountered. I should have remembered the saying "bad things come in 3s" because pretty soon we were bombarded with bad luck. After working all day trying to get our school's printer to work, we finally were able to print our boarding passes. Colleen and I were so happy to have everything all printed out when we realized that we hadn't printed our plane tickets for the way home. Well turns out, Jess had accidentally booked the flight home for March 27th instead of February 28th. My stomach immediately sank and I honestly felt like I was going to throw up. It was an easy mistake to make when buying tickets through RyanAir in spanish, but once again it was going to cost almost as much to buy the one way ticket home as it did for us to buy the round trip airfare the first time. Feeling very much like a Barber, I insisted we wait until we got to the airport the next day before buying the tickets home. I thought for sure there would be a chance that someone would take pity on us. Turns out RyanAir's customer service is as bad as everyone says it is. The lady at the airport in Italy was very firm in telling me there was nothing they could do. And no manager or higher authority seemed to exist. In fact I'm not even sure she worked directly through RyanAir. So we were forced to bite the bullet and buy the tickets home. The prices had gone down slightly though so we did have at least a little bit of luck on our side.
Oh right I'm missing one. Well the third bad thing that happened on Thursday only really affected me and Colleen. We woke up early to make sure we'd catch the bus to the airport. We stood at the bus station for a good 20 minutes with our bags waiting to see the bus come around the corner. When it finally did it stopped across the street from where we were. We ran after it yelling and saw people on the bus pointing to us. (Not to mention Molly and Jess were already on the bus from the earlier stop yelling, "Espera!") Long story short the bus left us stranded with no other option but to suck it up and split a cab to the airport. It could have been worse, but it was still not a great way to start off such a long trip.
After the hour long bus ride into Milan from Bergamo airport (a small airport that RyanAir can afford to fly to for cheap), we went out for lunch. I ordered a pizza with shrimp and mushrooms that the waiter said was his favorite. We of course followed that up with a cup of gelato. It was delicious as was everything I ate while in Italy (and believe me I ate more than my fair share of food). There are some weird customs though that I wasn't particuarly fond of. First of all instead of tipping (which you don't do at all in Sevilla) you are charged table service if you choose to dine in. And tap water does not exist. Nor do water fountains. Meaning you must either be dehydrated, spend tons of money on bottles of water, or fill up your water bottle in the bathroom (yes, that's the one I chose). Plus in general we found we had a hard time ordering what we really wanted since we didn't know Italian. A surprisingly large number of people we met spoke perfect English, but in the whole in the wall panini shops we often found ourselves in we had to just point and hope we ordered well. Luckily I think you'd be hard pressed to order something that wasn't delicious in Italy. It really did make me appreciate my ability to speak Spanish. I'm not fluent, but just being able to get around without a problem is something I've been taking for granted.
After a long day of traveling on Thursday, it was nice to just relax after checking into the hostel. We went to this panini shop that the hostel owner recommended and it was absolutely amazing!! I know my mom can make a great sandwich, but the paninis at this little whole in the wall put up some stiff competition. After that we met up with one of Colleen's best friends who is studying abroad in Florence this semester. We went to this bar called Fish Pub and the owner was very nice! He was from the Dominican Republic so we got to speak to someone in spanish for a little while.
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| Panini from my first day |
On Friday we woke up pretty early to a wonderful breakfast at our hostel. In fact our hostel itself was incredible. For being so cheap, the customer service was amazing. It was really small (only 8 beds in one room, 6 beds in another) but really personable. Everyone was so friendly and Johnathan, the owner, was accomadating beyond belief. He gave us great suggestions on where to eat, circled things on a map for us to see, gave us free wine every night, didn't charge us for towels (something that most hostels do), let us use his printer to print boarding passes...the list goes on and on. He said at the end that next time we come back we'll get a big discount. His english was not very good but I wouldn't have changed hostels for the world...even if the location was not ideal. We met so many nice people in the four nights we stayed too. We were smart to base our bookings off of hostels that have the best reviews.
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| Us with Jonathan on the last day. He was so sad to see us go and insisted we take a picture! |
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| Panini from day two was even better than my first one! |
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| One of the many streets in the leather market |
After climbing the 400+ stairs to the top, we decided to treat ourselves to an italian lunch. We split bruschetta, a pizza, gnocchi and desert at a restaurant and stuffed ourselves full. After that we walked around the leather market. Florence is known for their leather and it was really fun to just walk around and see different people's tactics for trying to sell you stuff. Jess ended up buying a really nice leather jacket for way cheaper than the original asking price.
After spending far too long shopping, we walked towards the river specifically to find this gelato place that Jonathan had recommended (it was cheap and was made from milk and not water like some of the lesser quality gelato places). The views along the river were even more beautiful than the views from the tower. The gelato place we went to was out of this world good. I don’t know if I’ll ever be satisfied with just Breyer’s vanilla fudge twirl again.
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| View from one of the many bridges |
For dinner that night we went to this place that Jonathan recommended. I ordered the pasta the waitress said she liked best. It was really spicy, but delicious just the same! We then went out with some of Colleen’s friends. We ended up at this club called Twice. It’s apparently where Jersey Shore went a lot while they were filming in Florence. It was disappointing and needless to say we did not go twice. We did get more of a sense of how forward Italian men can be. Turns out they are even worse than Spanish men at discotecas! Colleen’s friend told us that if you make eyecontact with an Italian man they automatically consider that a signal to more or less pursue you for the rest of the night. It was hard to dance seeing as how I was trying hard not to look anyone in the eye. Luckily we didn’t have to deal with anyone too weird. Mostly they just tickle your back and try to talk to you. Very weird and very awkward. We didn’t stay very long at all.
On Saturday, after grabbing a quick caprese panini (if it isn’t obvious by now how good the food is and how much I ate then you haven’t been reading very closely we hiked up to the Plaza de Michelangelo and saw some of the most incredible views of the entire city. We hung out and relaxed up there for a while. Very blissful. Before going back to get ready for dinner, we stopped in for gelatto one more time. For dinner we went to a restaurant called il Gato that Jess's friend Molly had recommended. Molly lives in Florence and she certainly knew good restaurants to choose from! We all got a bunch of different pastas to share as well as a few bottles of wine. It was a great experience. Then after that we went to see the lucky bore statue. Supposedly if you rub its nose then you will come back to Florence one day. I hope it comes true!
Sunday was a very relaxing day. We tried to plan a day trip to the Tuscan countryside but it ended up being far more trouble than it was worth. But that didn't bother us at all because we were still in Florence! By far the best part of the day, and really of the trip, was the meal we had on Sunday night. We all decided that it would be worth the splurge to try a real family style Italian restaurant called il Latini. We found great reviews for one and got there before our reservation to beat the crowd. They essentially just suggest different courses for you to try and everything we ate was absolutely amazing! The meal is accompanied with a 2 liter bottle of their house wine which was very good. I really didn't think I liked wine very much before coming to Europe, but now I'm beginning to really like it. They started us off with appetizers that consisted of four plates full of the best prosciutto I've ever had. We then got a plate full of fantastic sausage with tons of bread. Then he brought out a mysterious appetizer of some sort of meat on top of toasted bread. We all tried it and loved it. I asked him what the meat was when he came back and was surprised when he said it was chicken liver. Who would have known I like chicken liver!? After the appetizers came three different types of pastas: a ravioli, a gnocchi and a spaghetti. Here again I was surprised when he said the gnocchi had a rabbit meat sauce on it. Sounds weird I know but it was INCREDIBLE. Then after meat he offered soups which we turned down, preferring to go straight to the meat. We only ordered 2 servings of meat but the chef messed up the order so we ended up getting twice as much for free! We got lamb, veal, chicken and roast beef and it was all to die for good. After the meat we got two types of desert cakes. Both of course were delicious (are you sensing a pattern?). He then brought us a "gift" from the owner of desert wine and biscotti. We were nervous to have the owner come over and total up our check. But it turned out to be way less than I thought. I could have sworn I saw him write 300 as the total (to which my heart dropped) but was so glad to see it was really 130 for all 4 of us. He then came back with free limoncello for each of us. It was the absolute best way to spend 32 euros...in Italy in general you can't go wrong spending money on food!
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| Prosciutto |
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| Surprisingly delicious chicken liver |
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| Pasta sampler |
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| Meat platter (the after picture is much less appetizing) |
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| The 2 liter table wine. I forgot to take a picture of the deserts, but I'm sure you get the idea by now! |
On Monday we slept in for a little while and had a nice lazy day. We ordered delicious salads from the same panini place and bought some fruit from a local grocery store for our journey. It was a much needed change of pace from the carb overload we had experienced during the past couple days. I think in the dinner the night before alone, I ate enough food to feed a small family for a day! But overall no regrets.
We then walked to the train station to make sure we had plenty of time to get to where we needed to be. We didn’t want to take any risks given what bad luck we had had. So after finding the train station, we went to the McDonalds across the street to sit for a while and wait. We went back to the station about 20 minutes before our train was supposed to leave, but when I walked in I could not find our train number on the departures board. Confused, I walked up to the man working at the desk and asked for him to help me find it. His English was hard to understand, but I heard him say “wrong station”. We immediately all starting asking him questions. How far is it? Where is it? Can we walk? Do we have time? What about if we took a taxi? Luckily the lady next to him spoke much better English and told us if we ran we might be able to catch a train that was leaving in 3 minutes headed in the direction of that train station. We sprinted over to the train and got on without tickets. Luckily on trains in Italy they just come around later in the train ride to check tickets, so train hoping was not too risky. We immediately got off at the train station only to see that we had 5 minutes left until our train to Milan departed. Frantically, we all started looking for someone who spoke English because we couldn’t understand how to change platforms without running through the tracks. Luckily a lady showed us the staircase and we made it to the train just in time. We got a workout in and in the end our good luck outran our bad luck. The train ride was 3.5 hours (we didn’t take the high speed train because it was much more expensive). We met a Ukrainian woman who gave us sunflower seeds. Well I guess we didn’t actually meet her seeing as how we had no idea what she was saying, but none the less she smiled at us and spoke.
When we got to Milan, we took the metro to the duomo in Milan. I was really not impressed with the city. Or at least what I saw of it. I’m glad we spent most of our time in Florence because Milan just felt like your typically big city. After hanging out in Milan for a while, we grabbed dinner and took the bus back to the Bergamo airport. Being cheap college students, we roughed it by “sleeping” in the airport. The concrete floors were freezing and the lights were really bright so I never slept for longer than 20 minute intervals. It was pretty miserable, but we saved some money and were guaranteed to be at the airport on time. Our flight left at 6:30 am and we were back in Sevilla by 9:50. Plus on the way home we were able to save money by taking the bus!
It is nice to be home in Sevilla. This place really does feel like home to me now! Traveling was so much fun and Florence is definitely a place I hope I go to again, but after a long day of traveling and no sleep I cannot wait to sleep well in my own bed tonight! Plus going on a run today gave me a reality check about the amount of food I ate in Italy!
I’ll be sure to keep you guys updated on what happens this coming week! I only have two days of class this week, but I need to catch up on the work I’ve missed. This weekend Colleen and I are going to try to go to Ronda if the weather is nice and hopefully try and see a Sevilla futbol game on Saturday. Then of course it’s time to watch our Tar Heels beat Duke!
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