My First Weekend Adventures - Part II

Hey y'all -

So, I'm almost done with my papers, and I'm taking another break to finish writing about this amazing weekend. :)

By the way, the weather has been amazing today! It was kinda hot this morning, but now I'm sitting in a room at the AIRC looking out over the Imperial Forum area (that I'm writing one of my papers about) and all I want to do is go run around outside. It feels glorious. Anyway...

On Sunday, we woke up really early and checked out of our hostel. I walked with Alex, Shyam, Apu, Stephen, and Royce to the train station where we caught a train to Cinque Terra (which means five cities/lands in Italian). There, we hiked and rode a train through the five coastal towns. They were so quaint and beautiful! The views were amazing. When we hiked from Town 1 to Town 2 (they have cute names, but I can't remember them), we stopped to eat right on the edge of the rocky cliffs overlooking the ocean. It was amazing! And the weather was perfect. Not too hot, but just warm enough. In the fifth town, we got to go to the beach for about an hour. It was amazing because the water was so beautiful (especially compared to Galveston). It was perfect... expect the ocean ate my sunglasses. But, now I just have an excuse to get Italian sunglasses. :)

We met up with Vicki and Harvey (they hiked all 13 kilometers through the five towns), and bought train tickets to Pisa. We boarded the train and most people fell asleep pretty quickly.

So... It turns out that we were supposed to change trains somewhere along the way to get to Pisa. Unfortunately, we didn't know that. Shyam and I were talking when we realized that the train hadn't moved in about 15 minutes. So, he went to go check to see if there was a problem. He couldn't find anyone on the train, but eventually found someone who spoke English, who told us that we should have transferred trains one stop back. Oops! We figured out that we could still get to Pisa, but we had to wait around for about an hour for a train. Then, a train took us directly to Pisa. We arrived in Pisa at about 20.00 and quickly walked to the LTP (leaning tower of Pisa) to take pictures before the sun went down. By the way, the grass on the lawns near the LTP is perfect. I wanted to play barefoot tag all day there. But, it had been a long day, and so didn't.

After taking some really adorable pictures, we went to go eat Indian food. I thought I didn't like Indian food. But, apparently, I really like Indian food. (Thanks, Apu and Shyam!)

After dinner, we walked around Pisa for a bit. We found this street next to the river that was like a Pisa 6th Street. (Except not quite as cool.) We sat down for a bit outside just people watching. Then, we headed back to the train station. We waited until 2 AM for the next train going to Roma. We were all really tired and delirious. But, Vicki started a Disney singalong on the train platform, and that was pretty fun. Also, Royce tried to show us magic card tricks, but none of them were really working... Poor Royce.

When we got on the train, only to realize that it had those creepy sleeper cars. (It was HarryPotter-esque.) So we had to split up into two groups of four. We each got about two hours of sleep on the train. Shyam and I stayed up first to watch peoples' bags and we played 20 Questions a few times. Then, he and I got to sleep until we got to Termini. It was about 6 in the morning when we pulled into Roma. Then, we took the metro home and walked back to our apartments. Then, I slept until about 11 this morning. Then, I took a shower and met up with Alex to walk to AIRC.

Since then, we've been to lunch, chatting on Facebook, and writing our papers that are due tomorrow morning.

I'll finish my papers tonight, and then I have a lot of reading to do as well. I really did forgot that I was in school this summer. But at least I'm learning interesting stuff. :) I still can't get over the fact that I'm writing a paper about Trajan's Forum and I'm sitting in what would have been Basilica Ulpia in Trajan's Forum a few thousand years ago. So cool!

Anyway, those were my first weekend adventures! More to come, of course.

I love and miss you all!

Ciao,
Ashley