This weekend marked our first travel days in the summer program. The trips are not school sponsored, so we all have complete freedom to go where we want. After getting a small group together, some of my friends and I decided to go to Florence for the weekend. Mainly on the grounds of Cinque Terre was completely booked, but there were lots of really cool things to see in Florence as well. Although the amount of people going to Florence was around twenty, we all split into smaller groups for travel and hostel booking.
After our Friday classes, Mike, Mark, and I got on a bus and headed to the Castelfranco train station. We arrived at about 1:30PM, and immediately went in to get our tickets to Florence. We weren't surprised when there weren't any ticket options that included a direct ride to Florence, so we spent a little while figuring out how we'd go about getting there. We ended up deciding that we could just buy a ticket to Padova and go fron there. This is where our unintentionally long and frustrating journey began.
Many of the trains to Padova were full, so we had to wait about two hours for the first available one. After about an hour train ride, we arrived at the Padova station, and tried getting tickets to the next city, which ended up being another smaller station. To make a long (9 hour) story short, a combination of misread tickets, misread times, and bathroom breaks resulted in three missed trains and three very angry students. Luckily, we met two girls (Kay and Katy) who had been studying in Italy for the past year. They helped us get the correct tickets and told us the best way to get to our destination.
We fianlly arrived in Florence at about 9:30PM, two and a half hours after we were supposed to check in to our hostel. This would have been a lot worse if the girls we met didn't speak fluent Italian and call the hostel for us to let them know we would be late. Anyways, we grabbed our things and left the train station to try and find our hostel. After wandering around in the dark and asking for directions multiple times, we finally just pulled out Google Maps and it led us to the hostel, Ospitale Delle Rifiorenze, where we arrived at about 11. We headed upstairs, cheked in, and went to our room (which was a lot like a prison cell, but at least we got a room to ourselves).
Later that night, we went to a night club called Space Electronica. This place is so cool! Just about everything inside glowed, and the atmosphere was very fun and energetic. My travel buddies both brought button-up shirts and pants, but for some reason I left mine at campus. Luckily, the club made an exception for my t-shirt and shorts attire since I had never been there before. The bottom floor was a really futuristic-looking bar with a stadium-style table and chair area. Stairs on the opposite side led up to a huge dance floor overlooked by a third level balcony.
The human statues were fantastic.
The next morning started at 9AM after much snooze button mashing. We tossed our stuff in our lockers and headed ito town. In addition to the cool shops and beautiful scenery, Florence seemed to radiate history. We walked around and looked at different museums and statue-laden squares scattered throughout the city. It was simply amazing. The streets were full of artists and musicians, making every street an exciting experience. The museums were full of fantastic pieces of art, but unfortunately, no photography was allowed. So the only pictures I could get were the ones I snapped quickly when no one was looking.
That night, we walked around trying to find a place to watch the big Inter Milan vs Bayern Munich. We found a cool little Irish pub with four TVs and a whole lot of people. We met some other people from our program and squeezed our way to a table to sit down. The people here were absolutely insane during the game. And I thought Alabama football was bad...
Mark went off to the club again after the game with some of the people we met there, but Mike and I just wanted to take it easy and relax. We found a really cool restaraunt in a big square in the middle of Florence where we listened to a funny Italian pianist playing good ol' American hits, including "I've Got a Feeling" and "YMCA." The accent made the whole performance. We went back to the hostel around 1:30AM. We waited in the common room for Mark, but we never heard from him. Hoping he was ok, we went to sleep, and the next morning, he called letting us know he was on his way back to meet us. He was at Space until 3 that morning, so he stayed with some of the other people we met earlier.
This post is starting to get a little long, so I'll try to wrap it up. We woke up the next morning at around 8, packed up our stuff, and checked out of the hostel. We grabbed some breakfast and started walking in the general direction of the train station. We went by the market and looked around for a little while, getting to the station at around 11:50. Our return trip went much smoother than Friday's excursion. We bought the correct tickets, cought every train, and made all of our transfers. We arrived at Bassano del Grappa ar around 6:15, so we had about an hour and a half to walk around in Bassano until our bus to Paderno showed up. We met some others from CIMBA, and hung out with them until the bus arrived and brought us all back to campus.
That was my weekend in a nutshell. I'm starting to think that I may just post on the blog for weekend trips or if something especially exciting happens during the week. Check back every couple of days for an update.
