The Amalfi Coast

Pompeii

Steph, Korissa, Sydney, and I journeyed to the Amalfi Coast in southern Italy on April 22nd! This was an organized trip with Bus2Alps, the company that also took us to Venice. We had a promotional code for 10% off because of the bus disaster so we decided to take advantage and see a little more of the country before we left.

We departed Rome Thursday night at around 8 PM and arrived at our hostel, 7 Hostel, at around midnight. 7 Hostel was ranked 8th best in the world, and it definitely was deserving! I swear that every hostel I have stayed at this semester has been extremely legit; before I left for Europe, I was expecting hostels to be shady, gross, and dangerous, but I was proved wrong.

The itinerary for the trip consisted of Capri on Friday, Positano on Saturday, and Pompeii on Sunday. However, the weather report predicted rain for Friday, so they switched it up and took us to Pompeii, where it wasn't a big deal if it rained, on Friday instead.

We left our hostel early on Friday morning and took an hour bus ride to the ancient city of Pompeii that was buried in ash after the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. Usually entrance to the site is 11 euro, but it was free the weekend we went. We had the option of paying 10 euro for a two-hour guided tour of the city, but we opted for the 5 euro audio tour instead. We figured that we would rather move at our own pace.

After we spent a good portion of the day wandering around Pompeii, the four of us ate (what else but) pizza for lunch. Naples, the birthplace of pizza, is also on the Amalfi Coast. Throughout the semester, we were seriously considering taking the train down to "Napoli" just to have some pizza then taking the train right back up to Rome. I'm pretty upset that we never did, because I heard that the pizza in Naples is unreal and how often do you get the chance to eat food at the place it was invented?! Oh well. Next trip to Italy will definitely include a stop in Naples.

Audio tour guides

Can you spot Mt. Vesuvius in the back?

Well, that's unfortunate...

Poor puppy dog :(

On Friday night, the Bus2Alps tour guides from both the Rome and Florence groups took us to a restaurant near our hostel in downtown Sorrento. Afterward, the whole group of us went to a bar for drinks and dancing!

Positano

On Saturday, April 24th, we had an early start to Positano! After a continental breakfast at the hostel consisting of croissants and cereal, we departed for the beach. The main attraction to Positano through Bus2Alps is cliff jumping. However, our tour guide, Amanda, broke the unfortunate news to us when we got there: because of rough water conditions, we weren't able to take the boats out. BOOHOO. Everyone was really disappointed but what can ya do? We had been relaxing on the beach for about six hours when it started to rain -- just as we were about to leave. Good timing.

Beautiful!

I wish I was that talented...

Saturday night, the hostel sponsored a "Mexican Food Night" and discounted drinks at the hostel bar. I was pretty excited when the menu offered beef tacos; however, my excitement quickly turned to sheer disappointment when the dish that they claimed to be a beef taco was actually strips of steak in a flour tortilla (I HATE steak). Sydney was my savior for the night, because she traded her chicken quesadilla for my dinner. Moral of the story: do not trust Mexican food at a hostel in Italy!

The hostel also brought in a band for the night, and we hung out for a little bit listening to the music. There was surprisingly a lot of locals at the hostel bar; I wonder if hanging out at 7Hostel is what a typical Saturday night for Amalfi residents is.

Capri

Capri was my favorite place that we visited during our Amalfi Coast trip! April 25th (happy 21 and a half birthday to me!) began with a 45 minute boat tour around the island. We were supposed to venture into the Blue Grotto (aka the Grotta Azzura) but, again, the water conditions were too rough. UGH! I was really looking forward to it too. To get to the Blue Grotto, you must lie down on a boat as it passes through a low opening. Once you get through the passage, you find yourself in a cave with a gorgeous blue reflection created by the sunlight passing through the water. I was definitely more disappointed that we did not get to do this than the cliff jumping in Positano. We were able to see the Green Grotto which was still pretty cool.

Green Grotto

We spent the day exploring the island, tasting Limoncello (the Amalfi Coast's signature after-dinner liquor drink), frolicking through the Gardens of Augustus, and shopping for souvenirs. Steph, Sydney, and I also took a ride up the chairlifts to Mount Solaro, where we got great views of the Gulf of Naples and Anacapri. I was terrified on the way up; I had a pretty hard grip on that chair and found myself closing my eyes for probably half of the ride. However, it was worth it when we reached the top, although it was very chilly! I was expecting the ride down the chairlifts to be even worse, but it wasn't at all! It was actually quite enjoyable -- I loved it!

Gardens of Augustus in Capri

Chairlifts to the top of Capri!

View of Capri from the chairlift

At the top of Mount Solaro

Mid-afternoon, we got back on the boat and saw the rest of the island including multi-million dollar mansions belonging to the owner of Ferrari and the owner of the Florentine soccer club. A highlight of the tour was the "Tunnel of Love" where you are supposed to kiss your loved one as you pass through ensuring that you'll be in love forever. I knew little about Capri before my trip, but I did recognize this!

"Tunnel of Love"

We left the Amalfi Coast at around 7 PM and got back to Home Sweet Rome at 11ish. It was a great weekend!

Snow in Roma

We heard back from Bus2Alps about our compensation for the nightmare trip home from Venice; we get back the full 100% of what we paid plus 10% off a future trip with Bus2Alps. It was an awful situation to be in but now that it's over, I can just look at it as a free trip to Venice!

It literally does not stop raining here. I don't know if that's normal or if if it's rainy season but it's so miserable! I find it hard to enjoy any place when it's cold and wet. I woke up this morning to SNOW on the ground. Apparently it hasn't snowed in Rome since the 1980's, and it decided to wait for me to come. There is not much more that I hate than the snow so I am not pleased! I guess it could be worse -- I could be home and buried under the many feet of snow.





Today, we have classes. Normally we have every Friday off but for some reason JCU believes in making up holidays. It's weird, but we don't have classes Easter Monday so we are making them up today. My first class is at 5:30 PM today and I wanted to go wander around Trastevere (since I haven't been able to do that in the rain) but of course it's a mixture of rain/hail/snow outside. Lovely.

On another note, I'm going to Barcelona next weekend to see Jenna, and I also booked a trip to Amsterdam for the weekend after that (February 26-28). I'm going with Heather and her friends and we're meeting up with Jenna and her friends there. My roommates planned Munich for the weekend that I'm in the Netherlands which I'm a little bummed that I'm missing but I might go there with Lindsey in April. We are looking at weekends for Paris and maybe one other trip. I really want to go to Budapest, but I'm not doing a good job convincing anyone to come with me.

Tuscany, Venice, and the most awful bus ride ever

This afternoon I finally got home after about fourteen hours of the most exhausting, awful bus ride in my life but I'll get to that later.

Wednesday night, our friend Casey was promoting a club, Bloom, and invited us all to come. When we got there it was kind of dead and pretty lame so we left after about ten minutes. We felt bad leaving Casey's club but he gets 2 euro for each person that says his name at the door so at least he earned a little money off of us stopping by. We went to the club that we were at the week before, La Maison. There are always so many people there, and it seems like 90% of people are American students and the other 10% are creepy Italian men looking for American students. I was on the dance floor with my friends when I saw Heather Ahmad who just gotten to Rome the day before! I had no idea she was going to be at La Maison so it was so funny running into her.

Friday, during the day, we decided to be spontaneous and take a day trip. We woke up early and headed to the Roma Trastevere train station to buy a ticket and hop on a train. We were thinking about going to Siena but when we asked about it, the ticket lady said it would take four hours to get there and cost about 25 euro each way. Sydney had her Rick Steve's Italy book to look into another destination that would be less costly and not take so long. We settled on going to the town of Cortona which is the sight of Frances Mayes' book Under the Tuscan Sun and the movie with Diane Lane and Sandra Oh. I've never read nor watched Under the Tuscan Sun but my roommates have so they were excited about that. Cortona is about 2.5 hours away by train and costed 10.50 euro to get there. We bought our tickets but had a very difficult time figuring out what track we needed to be on. The lady who sold us the tickets told us that we had two connections -- one at the next stop and another at Roma Termini, the main train station in Rome. After missing at least one train to the next stop, as well as jumping on random trains to ask where it was going, we finally go to Roma Termini. The line we needed to take was for Firenze (Florence) and the next train did not leave for another 2ish hours. We killed time at the McDonald's in the station which was the most chique, retro McDonald's I've ever seen.

We finally got to Cortona at about 2 P.M. The town was cute and very quiet; for some reason it reminded me of Killarney, Ireland. We walked up some dirt roads to get a better view of the area and realized that we were probably walking through someone's private property. We went back to the main road and began to trek up to the top of the hill. Why in the world we thought we could this -- I have no idea. We walked up 250 km when it started to get dark and pouring heavily. I can't even describe how cold and wet it was. We looked further up the hill and saw that the road we were taking (which didn't have sidewalks so we almost got hit by crazy Italian drivers multiple times) curved all up and down the mountain -- clearly not meant for pedestrians. We were getting nervous, because it was getting dark so we didn't even make it up all the way to the top of the hill. We later read that there's a bus from the train station to the top. Oops. I guess it would have been helpful to see this before we started walking by foot. We got a quick piece of pizza (plus a Nutella crepe -- SO good) and made it in time for the 6:30 train.

Cortona in Tuscany, Italy

More of Cortona

A week or two we signed up for a day trip to Venice sponsored by Bus2Alps.com which specializes in trips and excursions for students who are abroad. We had to meet at 8:40 AM at Roma Termini to catch a bus that left at 9 AM. The ride there was long, but not awful. Some people slept; I mostly listened to my iPod and talked to the people around me. The ride was supposed to take six hours (long for a day trip, I know), but we didn't end up leaving until 9:30ish and we hit snow in the mountains which slowed us down a bit. We arrive in Venice at 4:30 PM. This stunk because we wanted to go to the Murano glass factory which closes at 5 PM and see the Carnevale parade. Because of the delay on the bus, we weren't able to do either of these. We took the water bus a few stops to San Marco, the main piazza in Venice, while taking lots of photos on the way.

On the water bus in Venice

Venetian gondolas

Steph and me on the Grand Canal

We shopped around for masks for Carnevale, an annual festival in Venice which takes place two weeks before Ash Wednesday and ends on Mardi Gras, the day before Ash Wednesday. I learned that it means "farewell to myself"; I'm assuming this is because you give up something important for Lent (I decided to give up late night snacking -- as you may see in some of my pictures, it's definitely having an effect on me). The mask I chose is a simple pink, glittery one. Korissa, Steph, and Cara got ones with feathers, and Sydney got one with bells. Some of the masks men were wearing had a beak -- it was very odd.

Some of the people who dressed up for Carnevale went all out. There were some super crazy outfits that people were wearing -- huge dresses, wigs, and hats. I kept saying that I felt like I was in a R.L Stein Goosebumps book or an "Are You Afraid of the Dark?" Nickelodeon episode.

Venice is beautiful but extremely hard to navigate. When we left San Marco, we took the water bus to another part of the city for dinner. After eating, we were wandering around for a while, looking in shops at Murano glass, when we ended up at Piazza San Marco again -- but we didn't take a water bus there. We got a few good laughs when we realized we had no idea how we managed to do that.

It was around 10 PM when we were finished with dinner and didn't know what to do next. I had wished we were there earlier in the day to do the glass factory, but Venice is dead at night. We saw one or two places with nightlife but the streets were vacant and downright creepy. I cannot imagine spending more than a day and a half in the city. I heard that Venetians are always depressed because it is constantly raining, and they are so isolated. I don't blame them -- I can't imagine taking a boat to go anywhere and everywhere.

Carnevale masks!

Sydney and me in our masks

Korissa and me on one of Venice's canals

Vicenza at night

My roommates got some gelato and hot chocolate (which is literally just a melted chocolate bar -- it's so thick) to kill time before we had to be back at the bus by 1 AM. We ended up getting to the meeting spot at 12:30ish. We scoped out good seats on the bus -- Steph and I were in a row with no one behind us (ideal for sleeping on the six hour ride back to Rome). However, there are about twenty people late to the bus and were catching a water taxi so our comfortable situation didn't last very long when they showed up. Actually, probably the drunkest girl in Venice at that time sat behind me; I really thought that she was going to throw up all over me. We finally left Venice at 1:30.

Not more than a half hour into the ride, our bus started making a weird noise. Our bus driver pulled over and we could hear him hammering or chiseling something. Everyone on the bus was like, "Oh great. We got a flat tire." Then there were rumors that something was wrong with the engine. I would have taken either of those problems over what really was wrong with the bus. Apparently the pipes froze and were cracked -- a problem very difficult to repair. Our Bus2Alps representative kept telling us that we would be back on the road in 10 minutes. Then 30 minutes. Then 10 more minutes. Finally, she explained that we would have to wait for another bus to come get us, and the nearest bus that could come was in Interlaken, Switzerland. Ha. Imagine the frustration and anger in the bus when we heard that we would have to wait on the side of the road until another bus came down to pick us up. I'm not sure what happened, however, and about an hour or so later we started driving again (by the way, the other bus had to wait with us too; I probably would have been so angry if I was on that bus, because they were capable of driving). It was 5 in the morning when we were finally able to get going (which I was a little leery about, because we were on a bus that I thought was going to blow up with us in it at any point). I fell asleep for a bit and when I woke up, the sun was out and it was 9 AM. I woke up just just as we were pulling over AGAIN, and our representative said we had to wait here for another bus. She said it would a half an hour for the bus to get there and then 2.5 hours back to Rome. That was underestimating it by a lot. We waited for an hour for the bus and had 3.5 hours to drive after that. We were only south of Florence when we switched buses. I don't know why we made it only that far during the 3.5 or 4 hours that I was sleeping but we should have been way closer to home than that. We got 20 minutes closer to Rome in our new bus when a girl got a call from her friend who was left at the rest stop. I'm not sure why this wasn't noticed before we pulled out -- the representative did a head count and asked if anyone could notice someone missing. Apparently there was someone who decided to wander from the group by herself. This cost us another 40 minutes to go there and get to the point we were at. We lost an hour that way.

We finally got back to Roma Termini at about 2:30 PM when we were scheduled to arrive at 7 AM. We were safe and sound back in our apartment at 3:30. It was such a nice day out today too -- what a waste. We wanted watch the Super Bowl but all of us are just too exhausted to move from our apartment.

All in all, a fun weekend but spoiled by the horrific bus trip back from Venice. Bus2Alps promised compensation for our troubles; I'm hoping for a full refund because we were paying them for transportation only and they couldn't even do that. We'll see what happens. It's 10:30 PM here -- already way past when I wanted to go to bed. This entry has taken me about 2 hours. Buonanotte!