Three trips and one count of stomach flu later...

I'm finally back to blogging. It's been a crazy month so stay with me- I'll try to put in as many pictures as I can in this post so it's not so boring! (remember you can click on the pictures to make them bigger!)

Fall break 2009 was quite an undertaking. My roommates and I started out for Milan on Friday October 23rd. Honestly most of Milan was a blur. As flight was early Friday morning we left for the airport at 3:30 a.m. Wanting to make the most of the day, we dropped off our bags at the ABC budget hotel and headed into the city. Our first order of business was to find food, so we checked our collective library of guidebooks and found what came to be the best food I ate all trip. My friend Madelyn's book suggested a bakery right near the Duomo (a duomo is the general Italian word for a cathedral- we saw a few during our time in Italy) for good Italian food that didn't cost a fortune. It couldn't have been more right. The place itself was tiny- standing tables only. I got a huge slice of pizza- the best I've ever had in my life for less than 3 euro.The place was packed so we ate in the piazza in front of the Duomo. Pizza in the piazza haha. The rest of our time in Milan was spent climbing to the roof of the Duomo and taking a hop on/hop off bus tour of the city. We also went on a wild goose chase to see Carravagio's still life. Just for future reference, Pinacoteca does not mean a museum named after pina coladas and discotecas, instead it means picture gallery and more than one museum in a city could be known as a Pinacoteca. That would be something the guidebooks neglected to mention. In retrospect, saving a few dollars and taking the earliest flight possible was not worth it. I was so sleep deprived that I couldn't fully appreciate the city. However, I do feel Milan is a city where great and beautiful things are produced, but there is not as much to see there. Our taxi driver one day joked with us that Milan is a city to visit when you have a husband who will take you shopping. Perhaps I will have to come back. For any readers who are planning a trip to Milan, DO NOT stay at the ABC hotel. It gets decent reviews on Hostelworld.com and our room was fine and decently clean, but the entire building was lacking hot water. It was the coldest shower I have ever taken in my life.

We only stayed in Milan for one day- I would've liked to spend more time there, but we were on a tight schedule so Saturday the 24th we set out for Florence. Due to some difficulties while booking train tickets, I ended up in a different compartment than my travel mates for our journey from Milan to Florence. This mishap turned into my most interesting encounter with Italian culture all trip. I boarded the train early and waited to see who I'd be sitting with. As my train companions filed in, I couldn't have been more happy. There ended up being 5 of us total in our compartment- a couple who were in their late 60s early 70s, a 40ish year old man, a 30ish year old woman, and myself. Even though I don't know more than five words in Italian we all managed to communicate through broken English and hand gestures. By the end of the trip we were all sharing food, showing pictures of our families and having a great time. As I got my stuff to exit the train in Florence, the older woman wished me luck in Italian and I was off.

The difference between Florence and Milan was immediately apparent. Florence is a much smaller town, cleaner and more quaint. It is also MUCH warmer than Milan. First stop, drop our bags off at our hostel, Hostel Greci. Not only was it cheaper than our hotel in Milan, but it was much nicer, felt less sketchy, AND had an awesome Melrose Place board game! Direction in Italian couldn't stop us from having a good time as evidenced by the pictures on the right. I highly recommend it. After dropping off our bags, we headed toward the museums. The two most famous museums in Florence are the Uffizi and the Galleria Accademia. We had plans to do both in one day. While I feel like I got a lot out of going to the museums and highly recommend seeing both, doing them both in the same 24 hour period is tiring and you can really only take so many pictures of baby Jesuses before everything starts to blend together. The Accademia is essentially three rooms with Michelangelo's Statue of David in the center. It take an hour tops to see everything. The Uffizi is different. It's absolutely huge and you could probably spend a whole day there if not longer. My favorite piece we saw was Botticelli's Birth of Venus (<--).

The next day we took a train ride to Cinque Terre which is a cluster of five towns on the coast of Italy. It was quite possibly the most beautiful place I've ever been in my life. There's really not much else to say- I'll let the pictures do the talking:You can hike between the towns- one of the hikes is known as the "Lover's Walk" where couples attach locks with their initials onto the fences- there were easily thousands of these all along the trail.

After our day at the beach, we headed back to Florence. The next day we climbed to the top of our second Duomo, visited the markets and just explored the city in general.

Pictures all of the sudden stopped working and I have to finish up a paper but I haven't posted in so long so I'll go ahead and throw this up on the blog. Hopefully tomorrow I can at the least finish posting about fall break. If anyone has any EASY Thanksgiving recipes- throw them my way. We're attempting to have a taste of home on a very non-British holiday!