Back away Gypsies

I have spent 3 days in Roma now and it was fun! Everyone in Italy seems to think I am a local..and keep talking to me in Italian. Even when I am speaking english. I dont get it..I look like a tourist..a decent outfit ruined with runners and a big map in front of my face.You walk down the road and turn a corner and boom..there are some acient ruins hanging out in the middle of a block. It is so weird to walk around and see all these places in the middle of a city. They first day we went to the Collesium (so cant spell that) which was huge! We walked around it and went inside...and made a bad call by doing an English tour. It started late and ended early and we didnt learn one thing! I am not a fan of tour groups...and this did not help the cause. Julia and I call every big group we see together "Contiki" cause thats the only tour group name we know. They take up so much space and its hard to get by them. Anyways inside the Colleseum was worth checking out but the outside is more impressive. It is hard to imagine what id did look like though...they took away so much of it to build other objects. Thats what I learned on this trip...old sites were used at quarries for building materials for new sites...so thats why so many look like they are falling apart. Oh the one thing I learned from the tour was that the Romans didnt feed the Christians to the lions there..only prisnors...that would suck. All around that area are ruins and we spent the morning touring around. It was really cool.
Roma is very hot and very humid so its hard to do a lot of walking and site seeing. Cultural crap takes a lot out of one. We did catch all the famous sites over 3 days.
We went to the Trevi fountain and threw our coins in to return. Thats what you are supposed to do and another coin grants you a wish. We saw lots of other places but those two were the best. All the squares have fountains which are really lovely as well.
Now the gypsies in Italia are getting very annoying. They sometimes like to wear matching outfits and stick there hands out in your face for money. Julia and I are good at spotting them and always give a gypsy alert before we walk by them. Yesterday I was on the pay phone and one came up to me blabbling in italian..and I said no I dont speak italian..then she says " you give me money" it was weird. I was annoucing that there was an annoying gypsy in front of me and she spoke english...woops. Anyways I yelled at her to go away and that I only had a phone card if she wanted that. She didnt. Weird. Not a fan of the gypsies. The best part of Roma is that they have 1L juice box container style of wine for....98cents!! Cheaper than water and jucie!

All that cultural crap

.We arrived in Florence a little sad to leave Cinque Terre...it is my favorite place right now. I wish I could go back. Right now we are in Roma but spent 3 days in Florence (too long) and a day and a half in Venice. Florence was fine, our hostel was huge and we ran into 2 people that went to high school with Julia...random. We went to the Galleria Dell Accademia and waited in line for 40 mins to see the statue David. Julia and I felt like we were in line at the club...the bouncer at the front wouldnt let us in even though we were at the front and kept letting in tour groups or the "vips" who had advance tickets. It was worth the wait cause it is amazing..a lot larger than I expected. Other than that the rest of the gallery was full of Jesus paintings and Ive seen so many now that they all look the same. We walked past the Duomo which is the 4th largest Catherdral in the world. It was very impressive and painted bright colors. We didnt go in cause the line up was HUGE. Thats what I learned about Florence there is a line up for everything! The best part of the time spent in Florence was going to the Palazzo Vecchio It was the original city hall and still is. We did a secret passages tour and got to find secret entrances and stairways that the old rulers used. They have an amazingly large room that is still used today for city hall and the ceiling has tons of huge paitings on it. We went in between the ceiling and roof to see how they held the heavy gold frames and the ceiling and roof up. It was actually quite interesting.

The next day Julia and I were feeling like we still needed some cultural crap (I like to call it that now) and wait almost 2 hours to get into this art gallery!! We got there at 830 in the morning! It was such a waste of time...we vowed to not go to any more art galleries for awhile. It was mostly Jesus paintings again...and then we thought the Angel painting from Rahphel were there but not. (False advertising) and I only recognized about 3 paintings. The "last supper" painting wasnt even there even though they had a DiVinci exhibit. .
After that we hiked up to the top of a hill and saw a great view of the city and enjoyed a healthy lunch of chips and beer while the gross pigeons kept trying to steal them away.

Venice was a lot nicer than Florence but unfortunatly has way more pigeons. I sort have developed a fear of them because there are CRAZY! They sell feed in the markets and dumb people go around feeding them. They fly anywhere and everywhere and dont care about taking people out so there is a lot of ducking involved when walking close to them. Besides the pigeons Venice was pretty. There were no cars around and the bus was a boat! We toured a couple glass showrooms and saw how they make it. They have really nice glass things We didnt do cultural crap but we did go to the Palazzo Ducale. It was the official residence of the Doges (the head leaders of Venice) We toured around their rooms....the Senate rooms and the Prison!! We walked over the bridge of sighs which was named from Cassanova from all the women sighing when he went to prison. I think. We took a boat around at night too and saw the city light up. The streets make no sense there but somehow we never got lost...even though we barely looked at a map. Randomly when we were trying to find our bus boat I ran into Nick Lepard, a friend from highschool. Next on to Roma!

Would you girls likea somea winea?

My blog site is in Italian...im not even sure if i am posting this right now.

Julia and I spent 1.5 relaxing days in Cinque Terre. The train ride there definately was a tad stressful though the 100s of other Canadians waiting for the train helped. Everyone waiting was from Canada or the states..it was weird. I even bumped into Angela from UVIC and I havent seen her since end of exams last year! We met these 2 girls Tiffany and Karalee from Qualicum and they ended up missing their connection to Venice and coming to Cinque Terre with us! Our train was late and then it switched platforms and it wasnt announced so everyone was running down to the next platfrom. The train arrived and all the doors opened except for our car. There were a bunch of us just running and trying to get into another door when all the doors started shutting. A couple guys were trying to hold the doors open for us....eventually they closed all the doors and there were still people outside. They opened them 5 mins later... that was a stress.
Julia and I havent really mastered the language yet...even though I did take a semester of Italian at school. So we talka witha italia accents..so maybe the people willa understanda us. It must get very annoying for people around us. I went to the front desk and the man spoke no english and shoved the phone in my ear and I had to try to be a translater for him....i didnt do a good job and im pretty sure they people decided not to stay there..woops.


When we finally got to Cinque Terre is was beautiful! We stayed in the village called Monterosso which is on the end of the 5 fishing villages on along the water. We had a room to ourselves with a "double" bed which was 2 twins pushed together. We didnt have a bathroom..we had to share the one in the hall. However we did have a sink, a mirror and a ba-day (so have no idea how to spell those) right beside the sink. Kinda weird since it was pretty much beside the bed...dont really know who would use that if the other person was in the room..nowhere else to look if you were on it. Eww we did not take part of the culture. We got our first Italian Gelato which was sooo amazing.
I took a picture to document it.It was so good I got a second one..so far the count is 4 and ive been in Italy for 3 days. We went out for dinner for some good Italian pasta and wine! On our way back to the hostel-hotel a man came out of his house and said

"You girls wanta the winea. Comea to my cellar and youa buya mya winea."
We followed him into his wine cellar and we bought our most expensive bottle yet.. 7.50 Euros. (Usually we spend 2-3 on bottles)We went down to the beach with our girls and drank our wine. Except the Qualicum girls wine was corked and a little fizzy and ours smelt like rotten eggs. If you convinced yourself it was cheese it was easier to drink...it tasted fine and we already had a bottle before so we just drank our smelly wine! Afterwards we went to the local bar called "fast" and got another bottle of red wine...we were the only girls there so these 2 American guys saved us from the locals.

The next morning we did the hike between the villages. It was so beautiful but a lot hard than I expected. The first leg too us just over an hour and was the hardest. It was like mini grouse grinds...and then going back down and then back up. The views were spectacular...you are either on little narrow paths along vineyards and trees or on the cliff side with the Sea crashing down below. The first village was cute and we stopped to have a snack and explore. The second leg wasnt as tough but still had a lot of steps going up up up. That took us just over an hour as well. The whole thing took about 5 hours including our stops. We had our first Italian pizza in the village...it was soo good. The water is so blue at our village so we went for a qucik dip. Well I dove in and got back out right away cause im a wimp with cold water. Shocking. We rented a paddle boat with a slide! We paddled around for an hour....a little sketch since they didnt give us lifejackets and it wasnt very calm. We survived.
We were going to save money and buy groceries but everything closes at 8 except the restaurants...so we just had to go out for pizza and pasta. It was tough...after we went to Fast and everyone was there...Angela and her boyfriend, and some American guys from Seattle who were really nice and were our age. After getting to bed late and waking up very early for our train..we have been very very slow today. We went to Pisa and took a picture. There was a big bike race or something going on so we bought matching pink shirts with a hat, and 2 key chains for 5 Euros. Apparently we looked like locals after we put on our hot outfits and everyone came up to us and started speaking Italian. It would have been good if I could remember how to say I dont speak Italian.
We are in Florence now...going to see many sights tomorrow.

Who packs a lunch for Monaco!

Julia and I have been in Nice for 4 days now. We are leaving tomorrow morning. The south of France has been fun. Nice definately is not my favorite place, it looks a bit tatty. There is construction everywhere and we are staying right by the train station so its also in a bit of a dodgy area. Yesterday we did however discover the nicer area of Nice so its a bit nicer than I first saw. I was a little disappointed with the area but then we went to Monaco then Cannes and some other small areas that made up for Nice.

When we went to Monqco they were setting up the the Grand Prix so there were stands everywhere. Everything is crazy there. We went to the casino and every car in the parking lot was either a Bently or a Rolls Royce or we even saw some Lambroginis. I so cant spell that. We didnt go into the casino cause we werent high rollers but we walked around the foyer and it was so beautiful with paintings on the ceiling. We walked up to see the palace and the cute little streets around the area. After we sat on the beach and ate our packed lunch, looking very out of place. Who brings a packed lunch to Monaco!
Cannes is by far my favorite place. They are setting up for the film festival which starts tomorrow. It was very exciting to be there. There are tons of white tents set up along the beach that are being prepped for the parties. A couple of the beaches have big stages and lighting. Too bad we wont be there for it but it would be too busy I think. The beaches in Cannes are the best too they are sandy while Nice and Monaco are rocky. Julia and I walked around the harbour and stared at all the yachts. We saw this one ill add the pic and it said Roberto Cavalli
so we couldnt decide if it was his or if he disgned it. Eventually I felt like a creep staring at the huge yachts waiting to be invited on board so I walked away. I am sorry to say I didnt step foot on one. Tomorrow morning we are off to Italy!

France

I am in Nice right now with Keeley and Julia. We arrived this afternoon from Paris. Paris was amazing. We saw the Eifel Tower and all the other famous sights. Ate lots of cheese and bread and drank really cheap wine! The first day we got there was on Julias birthday and we went the the Eifel Tower. We had a classy picnic under that involved all of us drinking wine out of the bottle and ripping bread and cheese. At night it was all light up and every hour in sparkled so when we were taking the elevator up it was sparkling. It was too late to clinb the stairs, they closed it off. On our last day there we did a tour of the Catachompes. It is an old mine that was used after to store the bones of all the dead people. The signs said they were placed in a decorative fashion. There were millions of bones and skulls piled along corriders that were 1.2 km long. It was really creepy. People could go down to pay their respects. I think it opened in 1750s. It was soo deep below the city. We went to the Le Louvre and a couple other museums. The Louvre is HUGE we did not even go to a whole wing of it. My french has been coming back to me very slowly but at least I can sort of understand what people are saying sometimes. This morning we caught a train to Nice. Its really nice here...we walked around and saw all the big yachts. I am still waiting for someone to invite me on theirs. Tomorrow we are going to Monacco which I am really excited about. They have casinos that are for high rollers only and we are gonna see if we can get in to get a picture.