Making the most of every day!

Gondala ride!

I LOVE the little canals!

Beautiful grand canal of Venice!

Cinque Terre!

The view from our last hike to Monterosso!

We made it to the beach of Monterosso after 1 and 1/2 hour hike!!

Last Wednesday Katie and I moved into our apartment in Florence and it feels so good to have a permanent home for the next few days! I am living with Katie Stockton, Mary Louise, Mary Southgate and two girls named Jenna and Meagan! All six of us realized that we do have four weeks ahead of us but they are going to fly bye, so we decided to jump on the train on Saturday and head to Venice for the day! In the ticket line at the train, we met a group of college kids from Penn State and two of them, Lauren and Chris, decided to come to Venice with us! Venice is such a cool little town on the water! I’ve never been to any place like it before! We walked all over the town and stopped to take pictures and take in the views of the water, colorful houses and gondalas! We saw a stand of fresh cut of fruit that we couldn’t resist since we haven’t had fruit in days ahh! Let me tell ya….it hit the spot! We went to a restaurant that is right next to the grand canal so we had a beautiful view of the water! Funny moment: Lauren, our new friend from Penn State and a Long Island New Yorker, out of nowhere whips out her box wine for the whole table…hilarious. The waiters quickly informed her that that kind of wine is solely used for cooking in Italy haha! They LOVED making fun of her for that! After eating a delicious margherita pizza (of course) we jumped on a gondela! The gondalier quickly realized that we didn’t care about the history of random buildings because A) we wouldn’t stop taking pictures and B) we were so curious about his life and kept asking him questions! He was probably annoyed with us curious southern girls! He said that It takes 4 years of training to become a gondalier…woah!!

Today (Sunday) we headed to Cinque Terre with the Bus2Alps tour group for the day! We were so excited to put on shorts and running shoes since we've actually dressed nicely the past week! My running shoes have never felt so good! Cinque Terre is a group of five towns on the coast of Italy right by the Tyrrhenian sea. It was amazing! Unfortunately we couldn’t hike through all five towns because there was a mudslide in October and three of the trails were blocked off. We walked from town 1 to town 2 then took the train to town 3 and got the best pesto spaghetti I’ve ever had! Pesto originated in Cinque Terre…yummy!! We then hiked from towns 4 to 5 which took 1 and ½ hours. The hike was all up hill for the first 40 minutes, but it was worth the incredible views of the beautiful aqua sea and colorful towns! With a sense of achievement and sore legs, we made it to the beach of Monterroso (the last town)! We grabbed a strawberry daiquiri, sat on a bench and enjoyed watching hysterial Italian and American beach bums including a man who was dancing by himself in the water…hilarious. I loooove people watching! We all agreed on the way back that it could not have been a better weekend!!