Firenze (Florence) and Overnight Train #2

Hello everyone and welcome to Italia!

Current location: Florence (Firenze) Italy

Prior location: Cinque Terre, Italy

Next stop: Venice (Venizia), Italy

Imagine that you are walking high on a cliff overlooking the Mediterranean Sea on your left, and on your right you see slender, 5 ft wide terraces of crops and vines reaching to the top of the hill. Ahead of you is a beautiful town of brightly painted buildings piled high on top of each other. This is Cinque Terre, literally 5 towns (Riomaggiore, Manarola, Corneglia, Vernazza, and Monterosso), known for their pesto and wine. Beautiful, but a bit overrun with tourists.

We stayed in a tent, in a town nearby, which was actually lovely bc it is cool there at night. It heats up during the day, and our favorite time was spent sunbathing on the rocky coastline, where the cliff meets the deep, blue, clear waters. A charming, but steep hike connects all five towns; we walked through four. To get to Corneglia, you must walk up 382 consecutive stairs. This was noted by a sign, however, we were not warned about the thousands more we had to climb and descend to get to Vernazza. Gelato rating: 8/10.

Getting to Cinque Terre was of course, an adventure, as we took a train (and by that we mean seven) overnight to get there from another small town. Try 18 hours in transit, with 3 hours in Switzerland (where we quickly learned they do not take euros), 4.5 hours in Domodossola, Italy... lucky for italian late nights, we got there at 1 am, and a gelateria across the street with a huge glowing ice cream cone indicating that they sold gelato(ice cream) greeted us. Gelato rating: 9.5/10, but perhaps we were just excited to find an open locale.

Chamonix, France was perfection on a platter. Watching the rock climbing was incredible. Only a few reached the top, because the climbs were so challenging. The winner of the French finals competition was staying in our Bed and Breakfast, and her boyfriend competed in the semifinals for the World Cup. AWESOME!

Drastic change in temperature here in Florence. Very sweltering. Everything here is walkable, and it was nice to arrive midday with a hostel already picked out. By their mistake, we were switched to a better location bc they overbooked the dorms, so now we are in a couples suite. Nice. :) On the streets of Florence, Blair bought some sweet purple aviator sunglasses for only 5 euro. Now we both look cool bc Marissa bought some fatty white sunglasses in Barcelona. Off to grab some more Italian food and see an opera, we hope.