Wow its been a while

Before I get into my Italy trip I want to say a few things:

1. First off, I think I have the best boyfriend in the world. I just got a package from him with all sorts of yummy snacks, including my favorites- SPICY CHEETOS and Tapatio sauce!, since there’s pretty much 0 spicy food in Spain. Each goodie in the box also had a note attached to it :). It was fantastic and I loved it!

2. People in Spain are crazy. Haha well, not literally. It’s just every time I go out with Spanish friends they always manage to keep me out until crazy hours in the morning. This Friday I went out until 4am- yes- 4am and my friends still stayed out even after I left. Even though we had a multiple friends leave before me they still gave ME a hard time when I left, saying I’m not used staying out so late because I’m American lol. Gotta love it.


3. ITS ALMOST CHRISTMAS!!! I can’t wait! The only sad thing is that after Christmas is done I will no longer have a countdown calendar with chocolate inside for each day :( I think I need to invent one for the whole year.

My first chocolate from the calendar!

4. I almost forgot to tell you- I went back to the town of Rute where they have the nativity scene of chocolate. This was a field trip with some of the students at my school and my friend Teresa (who's they're teacher)- yay field trips! I think that town has a separate museum for almost every food group because we went to the museum of ham (jamón), anís (anise-licorice), sugar, chocolate and turrón (almond made sweet)...and got samples at each one :) . Those are the 5 food groups right???

Ok now that we’ve gone over all that important stuff, let’s get into Italy before I forget what happened! I’m going to do this in separate posts because there is no way I will have enough time to sit down at write this all at one time. Let’s start with MILAN/FLORENCE…

Well we left Friday morning from Malaga and flew over to Milan. One thing I want to mention, not sure if its hit the US yet, but in Spain and in Italy at least you can go to these stands in the airport where they will basically wrap your suitcase in like this saran-wrap plastic stuff. It looked pretty cool so I got a pic.

Alright well I’m going to try to keep this post as concise as possible since I have SO much to tell from 11 days of being gone in Italy. So basically at the airport we people watched, I got felt up by a security guard, we hung out in MAC while my friend bought some makeup and then got on the plane to leave. After arriving in Milan we took an hour bus ride to the train station, where all the fun began…

So we didn’t exactly have our train tickets booked so we waited in line for about 30min to talk with a person who could help us book tickets (we couldn’t figure out the system on the machines they have because it was giving us different info). They told us that there were no tickets for that night or the next morning- AWESOME- and we already had hostel reservations in Florence. My friend basically spent the next 20min talking with the guy and we finally we able to have him help us out by finding a train that would get us to Florence that night. We weren’t quite sure why he wasn’t telling us about the train before...but we think its because it had a short transfer time to a second train that I suppose we could have missed. Anyhow then we had to deal with another guy who of course didn’t speak English and we didn’t speak Italian so that became a very interesting situation to say the least. When we finally got our tickets we grabbed something to eat and headed to the train, go on and headed to Florence. Needless to say we saw nothing of Milan that day except the inside of the train station, which actually is quite amazing. 

One thing that you MUST know about Florence is that in Italian the name is Firenze- that threw us through a few loops. Well when we got to our hostel, very tired and hungry, we dropped off our stuff and headed out for some food. We went to the closest pizza place and grabbed a bite to eat there. Of course they spoke no English so we managed with our beyond limited Italian (seriously we knew like 5 words) mixed with some Spanish. We each got a pizza, my mistake on ordering lol, but it was a good thing we did because we both ate the whole thing.

After that we headed to a bar that we were told would be open really late (most places around where we were staying closed early) and grabbed some wine. YUM! After we headed back to the hostel and passed out. The next morning we headed out on some adventures. The first was figuring out how the bus system worked. We had had a mis-hap the night before and in the end we took a taxi BUT we didn’t want to spend all our money on taxis the whole time so it was time to concur the bus system! It actually wasn’t bad at all and we also quickly realized that they seem to use the “honor system” there because when you walk on you don’t actually pay the bus driver but instead a little machine in the middle of the bus. In addition each time you buy a bus ticket you can use it for an hour and a half. We caught on quickly to the fact that less than half the people were paying for the bus tickets so we stopped altogether. We only paid for 1 ticket on our entire trip in Italy- don’t judge.

Finally we made it to Plaza (Piazza) San Marco and went into the Chiesa e Convento di San Marco right in the plaza. That was the first time that I realized that I wish I was a member of the EU- why? Because they pay half price on ANY entrance into ANY museum (in almost all senarios). I suppose that was at least good for my friend since she’s from Scotland but just flat out pissed me off. Well, we went into the convent turned museum and explored around, seeing lots of pictures and artwork that had been made. We weren’t supposed to take pictures but I think my friend snuck a few so I’ll try to get some from her. Basically all the pictures were religious, of course, and the majority were paintings of Jesus on the cross. The whole place was pretty impressive but nothing close to what we would see in the next few days. 

The rest of that day we spent exploring, entering into a beautiful church, eating some overpriced gelato on a warm waffle, taking pictures of the Duomo inside and out, eating pizza, and just walking the streets that were filled with people. I have to say that the Duomo was amazing. I mean the pictures show its size but you really don’t feel it unless you’re there- so go and see it! We also explored in this area underneath the Duomo which was pretty cool as well. We also went into the Galleria dell’ Accademia museum where we saw the famous “David.” I was able to snap a pic of him even though its not allowed. We spent a lot of time in that museum and I especially loved the temporary exhibit because it was about Greek mythology- something I’m actually quite interested in. Beyond that there was a room of sculptures that was really neat and one of the sculptures serisouly looked so real that I swear it could have just stood up and walked away. I would definitely recommend this museum to anyone visiting Florence.

Just walking along the streets was amazing in itself as well. There were so many different people everywhere and I really miss that. Some people were drawing beautiful artwork right on the street, I mean literally ON the street, some guy was singing with his guitar and some speakers in the middle of a plaza and there were street vendors everywhere. The city was just beautiful and it was by far my favorite of the whole Italy trip. 

By the end of the night we ended up going to a restaurant in an empty area of town, late at night and on a street called via Maffia- sounds safe doesn’t it? The restaurant had been recommended by a local so we wanted to check it out. We even passed by it the first time because it kind of just looked like an empty bar. We then looped back around and came back to the place, entered in and got a seat. The place was beautiful inside and actually quite romantic- so if you ever need a romantic spot in Italy check out via mafia in Florence. The food was also AMAZING- we got a pizza and a plate with buffalo mozzarella cheese, spinach with some anchovies and some other amazingly delicious cheese that I don’t know the name of. That place was by far my favorite restaurant on the entire trip in Italy, so definitely a place I will never forget…plus the wine was pretty good too :)

We eventually wandered off Maffia street and headed back to the hostel. We were both freezing since it was snowing temps there but we made it back without freezing to death. Actually on the entire trip I wore 3 pairs of socks, 3 pants and 3 shirts plus a jacket…definitely a change from Andalucía’s moderate weather. 

When we eventually woke up in the late morning, we headed out for another day of adventures in Florence. On this day we had a mission and headed back through Piazza San Marco and passed the Duomo to reach the Ponte Vecchio. We did get distracted by the street vendors and ended up stopping at a t-shirt shop to get some souvenirs for friends. When we finished we made our way back in the direction of the Ponte Vecchio. The Ponte Vecchio, by the way, is a famous bridge that has shops all along it and is filled with tourists. It was beautiful and even so amazing that one of our pictures came out looking completely photoshopped, but yes people, we weren’t lying, we actually DID go to Italy! After crossing the Ponte Vecchio (which we had actually crossed the night before to get to Via Maffia but it was late and none of the shops were open) we headed over the the famous Pitti Palace (Palazzo). Of course Italy had other plans for us- they museums had decided to go on strike that day (and a few after but we were leaving the next day anyhow) so we weren’t able to go in nor were we able to go into the Boboli gardens (Giardino di Boboli) but I suppose that leaves me something to do the next time I go to Florence!

In the end that ended up working out well for us because we wanted to check out Pisa. That night we headed to Pisa to see the leaning tower! We got there and got some help from some Italian guys to figure out what bus we needed to take to get to the tower. Of course we missed our stop so we just stayed on the bus while the bus driver did the rest of his route, quite fast, and circled around. THEN we got off at the right stop and headed over to the tower. We got this American guy to take our pictures although it was a little complicated because it was already dark out and the lighting was poor around the towers. Luckily my friend had a camera that worked great at night so she was able to get some fantastic pics.

*I will get them on here as soon as I get them from her*

When we went to head back we, of course, had just missed the last bus of the night so we had to walk it back to the station. We asked some random guy where a place to eat was and how to get to the train station. We went into this little restaurant on the way to the station and had some decent food and then headed back to Florence on the train. The next day we had to head out for another small town but we would be back to Florence one more time before our trip ended…