I've missed you internet!

It's been awhile, christmas has already come and gone, next up- New Years. I've been without Internet for the last few days and before that I was prepping for xmas so I've been pretty MIA...again. I'm going to go ahead and give you another post about Italy right now and then I can catch you up on christmas here and christmas eve...

Now back to Italy:

The next day we left Florence and headed to Cinque Terre, a small group of towns along the coast in Tuscany. Cinque Terre actually means five worlds because it is made up of 5 small towns, the one we stayed in was called Riomaggiore. To catch the train there from Florence is about 2.5 hours and a series of 3 different trains but VERY much worth the trip. We got off the train and we just astonished at how beautiful it was to be looking out into the ocean and I can just image how much more beautiful it would be in the spring and summer. Actually when we FIRST got off the train the exit was in the tunnel and we were thinking “where the heck are we” but we just walked out of the tunnel and found ourselves looking right at the ocean. Absolutely beautiful.

Next step, trying to find the hostel. We followed the instructions (good thing we had a print out of them) and found the hostel office. Since the office was in off season they were closed and left us an envelope with the key and instruction on getting to the room inside. I thought it was so cute and almost like a mini scavenger hunt so I was already in love with this town. We dropped off our stuff, wandered around, bought a XL bottle of wine and headed back to the room where we met up with our “roommates.” There were two girls, one from Australia and the other from Canada, and they were both super nice. We all went out for dinner that night. Well I should mention that before we headed to
the restaurant (pretty much the only one open in the town) we celebrated our stay in this tiny but gorgeous town with the big bottle of wine. Alright, so back to the restaurant, well we had some great food for super cheap. Of course this food included pizza haha and also had some nochi, more wine, dessert- tiramisu and some sort of pastry ball filled with cream and cover with chocolate mousse…and lemon cello shots! The lemon cello shots were from influence of the police sitting at the table next to us…they ordered some so we figured how can you come to Italy and not have some??? After dinner we spoke with the police officers with a variety of English/Spanish/Italian…

Also, just a side note, the waitress at this place was a girl from the UK who had taken up living in Italy…I have to say that I think ALL of us were pretty jealous of this girl.

Well after dinner we headed back to the hostel, in the pouring rain, luckily we were staying about 30sec from the restaurant :)

The next  morning was the “hiking” day which went well but the fact of the matter was that not much hiking was actually done. We intended to hike to each of the 5 small towns…we got to the second one and then stopped for wine. The hike pretty much stopped there haha. Well let me elaborate a little more, you see, the trail had been wiped out by a mud slide (or something to that effect) between the 2^nd and 3^rd towns so we had to take a train to get to the 3^rd and then continue. Unfortunately we had JUST missed the train and there wasn’t another for an hour…hence why we stopped and had some wine. THEN we went to catch the train, got to the next town, and it started raining…SOOO we caught the next train right back to our little town and did what? Took a nap of course! At least the pics we got between the two towns were super good…we went on the “Trail of Love”…how romantic.

After getting some rest all of us girls decided we wanted to get some night life so we went to the next biggest town, La Spezia, for some dinner and anything else we could find. After wondering around in search for a decent and non tourist filled restaurant we finally dropped into a local hairdressers to ask for a good restaurant close by- what a GOOD idea because the restaurant was great. To make it even better, everyone in there pretty much JUST spoke Italian- that’s when you know its good. After gorging of the yummy food we went to a bar where the girls had seen some cute Italian boys so they wanted to go back in search for them. The environment of the place was fun and so was the people watching haha. The girls finally got up some courage to talk to some guys to ask where we could get some gelato, glad they finally did but the timing was a little off because we had to then head back to Riomaggiore since 3 of us had to get up early in the morning to catch trains.

So we packed up early the next morning and headed out…this time to VENICE…