Here it is... Finally: Florence to Bern

Waking up Tuesday morning brought with it the unfortunate realization that our stay in the Cinque Terre had expired. Although sad to leave this coastal beauty, we were excited to begin the rest of our Italian tour, starting in Florence (aka Firenze in Italian). We took a short regional train out of Riomaggiore to La Spezia (8 min ride), then waited for our connecting train to Pisa for about an hour. In the interim, we conveniently found a McDonald's at the train station and each had a small breakfast cheeseburger to fill ourselves with some meat that had been lacking the last few days.

On the train from La Spezia to Pisa, we had a small incident with the on board ticket-checker man. Being unfamiliar users of Italy's state train system, and because our tickets we had purchased were not for a specific train time or seat reservation, we boarded one of the fast intercity trains. However, when the ticket was examined, it was apparently only good for the slower regional trains. The ticket apparently noted this, but being in Italian it was of no good use for us. He gave us a small lecture on boarding proper trains and the possibility of being hit with fines, but obviously looking like confused American tourists, we were let off easy.

When we got to Florence (after being sure to board one of the slower, dirtier regional trains from Pisa to Florence), we checked in at Andy Florence Bed and Breakfast. This ended up being our favorite accommodation to date. The owner was very friendly, they had fast free unlimited internet, great cooking facilities, few rooms and relative amount of privacy, a great breakfast included, good location, and a great price. We were very tired when we arrived and this place could not have come at a better time. We had hoped the Cinque Terre was going to be a relaxing place to energize our bodies after two weeks of travel wear, but two days of hiking in the beaming sun had erased any such plans. We thus took a nice afternoon siesta (turns out the siesta is both a Spanish and Italian phenomenon!). Later that day we took a brief walk through the city, but craving some food we found a supermarket and brought back pasta, bread, and chicken cordon bleu to fix for dinner.

On Wednesday, after a nice breakfast, we started the big sightseeing day through Florence. We started at the Duomo, one of the oldest cathedral's we've seen on the trip, from the 13th century. It has the third longest nave in the world behind Rome's St. Peter's and London's St. Paul's (all of which we are going to see!). After viewing the Duomo, we began wandering around the city on foot. The historical district of Florence is actually surprisingly small. It does not take long at all to hike from one end of the city map to the other. There is no metro there either. Along the way we encountered two ladies who recognized our Purdue shirts, one of whom was a fellow alum (can't believe we're saying that!). We saw some other cool Renaissance sites we can't even begin to name, and also walked across the Ponte Vecchio, Florence's famous old bridge stretching the Arno River full of jewelry stores and ridiculously expensive Florentine art. We also walked through the courtyard of the Palazza Vecchio and took in the sights of countless Renaissance sculptures and architecture.

By mid-afternoon we felt we had actually seen most of what we wanted to see in Florence. It was also very hot and we were still worn out, while allergies had begun to hit Nick pretty hard. Florence has a lot more to offer in museums to the art lover, but since the extent of our art knowledge does not reach beyond a mild appreciation of the Mona Lisa, we decided to return to the B&B and rest some more. We caught up on reading Nick's novel, The Tenth Justice, internet time, and made some more food for dinner. In truth, we were glad for the opportunity to rest and get our legs back as the coming journey to Rome was sure to be activity-filled. We did, however, make one last journey out through Florence as Nick was finally able to get a haircut by an old man at an Italian barbershop. Despite very clear (English) instructions to cut to 1 cm on the bottom and 2 cm on top, something must have been lost in translation as the bottom was buzzed very much shorter and the top was left very much longer. Laura could hardly contain her laughter. It was certainly not a masterpiece but at least he's in Europe where no one will see it! (It's really not too bad, haha)

Thursday morning we woke early to another good breakfast, refreshed, and ready to travel to Rome. After an uneventful train ride, we checked into Papa Germano's in Rome around noon. Soon after dropping our bags off, we hit the streets with plans to see the Ancient City district that afternoon - but not before lunch, of course. We walked down several of the city's side streets along the way perusing the street menus of the local restaurants looking for decent food at a decent price. Finally, at one stop, a women handed us a menu from the restaurant's steps and persuaded us to eat there. She asked us to take a seat inside, but we had already bought Cokes for lunch that we were carrying in our bags and we wanted to use though so we asked for an order to go, and pointed outside (she spoke no English). She then insisted that we sit outside at one of their sidewalk tables, and we obliged. We split a pizza and ordered tap water so we could use our Cokes later, but when the bill came (in Italian), there was a mysterious 3 Euro additional charge. We did not know what this was, so we called over the bus boy to question. He spoke some English, and answered that it was a seating charge. Not accustomed to this charge, we inquired why we hadn't been informed of this additional fee by any of the waitstaff or on the menu and wanted to make sure we weren't being taken advantage of as young tourists. After some back and forth bantering and what one might call a small international incident, victory was ours and the fee was dropped. We still left a tip for our waitress, however, who was very nice through the whole ordeal. Nevertheless, we weren't off to the greatest start in Rome.

To make matters worse, immediately after leaving the restaurant, the overcast skies made way for a heavy rainstorm. Protected by our small travel umbrellas and semi-waterproof coats we could only make so much headway before finding shelter in a large bookstore. Here, we perused their imported English fiction section and bought another book, “Plea of Insanity,” to fill for the soon to be finished novel Nick had brought from the US. We almost decided to head back to the hostel because forecasts called for thunderstorms all afternoon, but luck was with us and not long after entering the bookstore, the skies had cleared and the rest of the day was very nice.

From the bookstore, we headed to take in views of the ancient city from Italy's tomb of the unknown soldier. We then walked to the Colosseum and bought a combined ticket for the Colosseum, Palatine Hill, and the Roman forum. The Colosseum was pretty cool and reminded us that we needed to watch Gladiator again! From there, we went through Palatine Hill and the Roman Forum, a huge area of ancient ruins from the old political and economic center of the Roman empire. The remains were definitely cool. After a solid 8 hours of touring, we headed back to the hostel, bought some food at the supermarket, and went out for dinner. When we returned, we met our two roommates who had arrived while we were out, a friendly couple our age who had just graduated from Vanderbilt.

Friday morning we woke up early, ate breakfast at the hostel, then used the metro to traverse the town to visit the Vatican. All the guidebooks recommend arriving as early as possible to avoid the enormous lines that can form. Our first stop was the Vatican Museums and the Sistine Chapel. Fortunately, the lines moved quickly and we waited just 20 minutes. Once in, we followed the advice from all the books and rushed past probably a good hour of art galleries to get to the Sistine Chapel before hordes of people made their way to the esteemed church. The chapel was as awesome and ornate as we could have imagined, as every square inch of the ceilings and wall was adorned with paintings from Michaelangelo, Raphael, and other great teenage mutant ninja turtles (aka Renaissance artists).

After viewing the chapel, we proceeded to make our way backwards to view what we had skipped, but our attempts were dismantled by the Museum security who said no traffic can go backwards through the museums – probably an attempt to stop tourists who all read the same advice in the books. Fortunately, there were still plenty of exhibits and more than enough art in the museums and library to satisfy our needs following the Sistine Chapel. We even got to see the evolution of the Pope-mobile from carriage to high-tech bulletproof motor vehicle. No real Pope sightings, however.

Following our walkthrough of the Vatican Museums, we walked halfway around the country (since the Vatican is a sovereign state) and within 5 minutes arrived at Saint Peter's Square. The square was quite a sight with its rows of pillars framing a giant circular plaza that accentuated the grandeur of St. Peter's Cathedral set in the back of the square. It was still in the morning hours so the large crowds were just beginning to form. After a short wait in line to pass through security, we toured the basilica of St. Peter's. Needless to say, it was awesome inside. It was by far the biggest and most ornate of all the cathedrals we've seen thus far (which is more than we probably thought we'd see in a lifetime). We looked into staying around for a mass inside, but the next one didn't start for about 5 hours and decided the walk-through would suffice.

After visiting the cathedral, using our large Rome maps that surely identified us as tourists, we charted a route by foot that would take us all the way across the city and allow us to see a few more of the sites the city had to offer. We picked up lunch of focccacia bread, yogurt, and salami at a store along the way, then visited the Fontana Di Trevi, a gigantic fountain and plaza with some pretty cool motion-captured sculptures of old Roman gods and horses. We also made our way to the Pantheon, and visited the inside of this 2000 year-old temple. After making it back to the hostel, we rested a short while and then found a good sit-down dinner of lasagna, chicken, and salad.

We woke up early again Saturday morning in order to eat another tasty breakfast before catching our train to Venice. After a little over 4 hours of beautiful Italian countryside (and reading and naps, of course), we arrived at the Venice Mestre train station on the mainland. Since we are actually staying on the mainland at a campground and not in the center of Venice, we had to take a bus out of the city. We looked all throughout the train station, but there were no ticket machines to be found. We soon gave up on the ticket hunt and went to wait at the bus station. There we met a few fellow travelers headed in the same direction, none of which had solved the ticket situation either. Overhearing our conversation, a local bus rider informed us that we had to purchase our bus tickets from inside a bar across the street- of course, why hadn't we thought of that...

Tickets in hand we headed back towards the bus stop, but decided along the way that we should go ahead and purchase a few more sets of train tickets while we were already at the station. We planned out our train schedule over a lunch of you can guess what, and then went to the ticket line. After a short wait we cheerfully handed over the list of the trains to a less than pleasant looking old Italian man. He no more than glanced at our list before he waved a hand at us and sent us away to information to get the exact times that we needed. Note: this is the first person that has not happily shown us a list of all the times available and allowed us to pick the one we wanted. After looking through our Eurail timetable guide (which isn't necessarily accurate) to pick out train times, and waiting in line -again- we got stuck with the same train ticket Nazi we had the first time. I'm sure he was 'thrilled' to get to 'help' us again. This time he was upset that we hadn't listed the train station we wanted, even though only one station was listed in our time table. After a few minutes of conversing we had managed to only get one ticket. Then when we went to pay for our one ticket with a credit card, he made an angry face and told us that the line was down and that we had to pay cash- which we didn't have enough of at the moment. Of course there were only 10 signs advertising that they gladly took credit cards, and none that mentioned you couldn't use them today. Go Trenitalia.

After wasting nearly two hours dealing with what has been the most frustrating train system in Europe, it was time to take the bus to Camp Fusina. A large advertisement on the bus stop booth promised a backpackers paradise, but at a mere 13 euro a night we remained skeptical. The bus dropped us off directly at the gate of what appeared to be a pretty nice campground. After checking in, we headed back towards our very own cabin. Unlike the country log cabins found in state parks across America, what we have here is more like half a FEMA trailer on wheels. Lack of character aside, the trailers are actually really nice and clean, and nearly mosquito proof. Plus, we are saving 80 euro by staying here!! The rest of the campground is also quite impressive (and spotless). This place has its own supermarket, laundromat, restaurant, bar, and pizzeria- basically all the amenities of an entire town conveniently packed into a hundred meters.

We took it pretty easy this evening, and used our time to do some catching up on our laundry. Doing laundry is really expensive here, so we are sure to cram as much into one load as possible. The result of course, is that nothing is dry after one cycle, we are too cheap to have it go again, so now our cabin is sporting a funky t-shirt decor and smells a bit like a laundromat. After laundry time, we checked out the in house restaurants and picked out two kebab pitas to go. Remember the Nebab Kebab of Tours? Our pitas were delicious, and we suspect the meat was higher quality than what we had consumed at Nebab.

Tomorrow we are going to get up bright and early for a full day of sightseeing in Venice. We have heard fairly mixed reviews from other travelers, so we are interested to see what we think of the city. There is a boat that runs directly from our campground to Venice every hour. We are going to pretend that this is our gondola ride down the canal. A couple we roomed with in Rome to a budget gondola ride for a mere 80 euro – no way!! We plan on having a more budget friendly Venetian experience while still managing to take in all of the sights. More to come!

Sunday morning we woke up prepared to venture to the old slowly sinking city of Venice. Our campsite runs a boat service that takes its residents to and from the campgrounds and the lagoons of the main city each hour for a small fee, and we caught a ride at 9 am. The boat ride across the lagoon was fun, and we imagined it was a gondola since we weren't planning to take one of the traditional Venetian boat rides today. As the city approached, we could see four or five cruise large cruise ships already docked, and the outline of the city on several of the 118 islands that comprise Venice. The weather was again good today – very sunny, although a bit hot, with temperatures running in the mid-high 80s.

Once in the city, we began wandering just to see the sites and experience being in such a unique place. We didn't have any specific site seeing agenda today, just seeing the city and its canals was the main goal. We took some good pictures, and it is just as we had imagined it in pictures we had seen before. Some people had said Venice was unclean and smelly, but we thought it was fairly nice. There was definitely an overpopulation of pigeons, however. The birds feast on the generosity of tourists and do quite well. One even swooped down and clipped Nick on the head.

After 4-5 hours of exploring the city including a visit to an old musical instrument museum, perusing the countless shops, walking through a park, viewing the Ponte di Rialto and Piazza San Marco, and getting some lunch and gelatto, we took felt we had seen all we wanted and took the boat back to the campsite in the mid-afternoon. When we got back, exhausted from the sun, the walking, and the crowds, we took a small siesta (we are really adopting to the Italian way of life!), and then went to dinner at a nice restaurant here on the campgrounds. We ate well because tomorrow is going to be a long day of train travel with probably little food available from Venice to Bern, Switzerland.

For the final time in Italy – Ciao!

Yesterday (Monday, June 2), we got another early start in order to catch the bus that would take us back to the train station. Since we had our incident with the unfriendly ticket man two days before, we had not yet purchased reservations for the train to Bern, Switzerland. There was only one high speed train that left in the morning, all of the other trains took around 2 more hours so we wanted to be sure we got on that train. Our second ticket man was much friendlier, but we still had a fairly significant language barrier with him. After repeating 'tren to zurich' about 15 times, we had our tickets and were on our way.

The train ride to Zurich was around 6 hours. This seems like a long time, but the views (especially in the second half of the trip) were spectacular so this made the ride quite enjoyable. We went right through the mountains, and we could see countless snow-topped peaks and waterfalls. After arriving in Zurich, we had to catch a second train to Bern. We hopped off the train and quickly checked out the departure board- we were glad to see that a train was leaving for Bern in just 3 minutes. We hurried through the station, saw the sign for the departure for Bern, and hopped on the only train in the area. Once aboard, we noticed that the train was particularly nice for a regional train and we didn't recognize any of the station names that were posted as destinations. But we had followed the signs and gotten on the ONLY train by the track. We didn't want to get off the train and check the board again since the train was supposed to leave in less than a minute. Well... of course we weren't on the right train- for the second time on our trip. After looking at our rail map we figured out that we were heading towards the German border- oops. Luckily, the train stopped at a station about 15 minutes outside of Zurich so we got off and then took the next train back to Zurich. Then we got on a train that was actually going to Bern (after more thoroughly
examining the departure board this time).

After a nice long trek around the Bern train station and several side streets we made our way to the Bern Backpackers youth hostel. The directions appeared pretty straightforward- except for the crucial part where you see a clock tower on your right and a McDonald's on your left and then turn down an unnamed street. Turns out there are two clock towers and two McDonald's that fit this exact description on the one road that you take from the train station... After a bit of directional help from an English speaking student, we were set on the correct path and easily found the hostel. The place we are staying is new and clean, has a large common area, and best of all-- a kitchen!! We haven't had cooking facilities for a while now and it definitely makes eating well (and super cheap) much easier. After dropping off our backpacks we set off to get supplies for a delicious meal from one of many of the grocery stores we had past. Much to our dismay, EVERY STORE in Bern shuts down at 7pm. What do these people eat after work?? After a bit of searching, we ended up eating at a Mexican restaurant with decent prices. Food is incredibly expensive here. A typical restaurant meal is around $30 and frequently is much more. We settled for splitting the $30 appetizer platter- a bargain at $15 each!

When we returned to our hostel after dinner we were pleasantly surprised to see that we still had no roommates in our 4 bed dorm. We counted down to 10pm, which according to hostel policy is the latest they will check someone in. Since we were pretty tired from our day of traveling we went to sleep early... only to be rudely awakened by our new roommates checking in at 1am!! Needless to say, we were not happy campers. And to top it off, the girl had a bad cold and coughed continuously until at least 3am. We plan on complaining at the front desk later this afternoon.

After getting less sleep than what we had planned, we got up and around (somewhat loudly) this morning and then headed off to the grocery store. For only $30 we stocked up on what would probably be $200 in a restaurant, and went back to make a real American breakfast of scrambled eggs, toast with nutella, grapes, and yogurt. Once breakfast was finished we started our tour of the city. First we checked out the famous clock tower (the one we missed last night), then walked down the street to Albert Einstein's house. We were a little shy of the necessary amount of Swiss Francs needed for admission, so we decided to get Euro (also accepted there) and return later. We then decided to walk around and see the sites of Bern. It is a really cool town. Even though it is the capital of Switzerland, it is still very laid back, and looks very German, although very clean as well. Electric cables criss-cross the streets and intersections for a sophisticated Tram (trolley) system, and a the Aare River outlines the Altstadt, or downtown historic section. The river is the cleanest water we've ever seen, we have been debating if it is really even naturally carved or if it is a diverted channel paved on the bottom. Nevertheless it is very nice, and we took a hike through the town's Old English park around the river and the perimeter of the Altstadt. We also have checked out some of the very stereotypical-Swiss shops of which there are many – chocolatiers, watch and clock shops, pastry and cheese shops, and the Wenger store (makers of the Swiss army knives). We can tell that we've entered a new phase of the trip – return of the cooler weather (yay!), away from the classical Renaissance sites and into the larger German-type areas.

After a thorough foot-tour, we're now in McDonald's using their free Wi-Fi to update the blog and check e-mail. This afternoon we'll make late lunch and check out Albert Einstein's house.

Now, if you've made it to this point and actually read everything, good for you – otherwise, scroll back up and start again! Bye!