Italy

HELLO (CIAO) Everyone! It's pretty much been a whirlwind since France. We left on Tuesday to the Cinque Terra because everyone we met told us we had to go there. We are super flexible so off we went and had a great time. There are five different villages in the Cinque Terra and we stayed in Monterosso in a really nice apartment. It's kind of a funny story because we had looked for a place to stay on the internet, and couldn't find anything. When we got there we went to information and they gave us a sheet with some places to stay, which were pretty much impossible to find from their sketchy map. After walking around with our heavy packs forever we were all ready to cry cuz we were so tired and we didn't have any lead on a place to stay. When we decided it was a hopeless situation, the only lady in the village I'm sure that spoke English said hi to us and we asked her if she knew anywhere to stay. Her sister happened to own an apartment nearby but it was a little out of our price range. She said she could give us a special price and she took us to see the place. It was a mansion apartment we were so excited cuz we had our own rooms and a kitchen so we could cook for ourselves and we could do our laundry there for free. The next day we hiked to all the villages and saw the most amazing views and explored each of the villages. On Thursday we left for Florence, stopping in Pisa to see the famous disaster! We sort of caught the wrong train to Florence when we left Pisa so when we finally arrived there information was closed and we didn't have a hostel(I don't know why we do this to ourselves.) When we finally found a hostel it was full and so were all the hotels on the street except for one. Yesterday we went to the Gardino Bardino Di Eoboli and inside we saw the Porcellane museum, the Galleria de costume and another garden called Gardino Bardini. In the evenings we love walking around and seeing the cities at night so we walked to the river and since we are in Italy we had to get Gelato. Today we went to the Uffizi museum after waiting in line for 2 hours. We saw paintings from Leonardo DaVinci, Donnatello, Michaelangelo, and many others. Tonight we are going to a concert and tomorrow we are catching the train to Rome. Not sure how that is going to go because the trains are going on strike tomorrow. We were actually responsible and booked our hostel in Rome and now we don't know of we'll get there! We find this all quite hilarious! Anyways in a nutshell this is what we've been up to, check out Sheri and Starr's blogs cuz I think they wrote about more stuff.