Hello!
I'm in Florence... was supposed to be in Venice today... but Italian trains are a lil weird! I suppose it's Sunday, so less of them run... I guess it's good that I don't have many hard deadlines.
I only have one trip left on my Eurail pass! I'm going to pay for a ticket from Florence to Venice, then use my last trip to go to Sicily from Venice (From the north east of the country to the south west! Then buy a bus/train/boat ticket to Naples, then buy a train ticket to Rome, where I hang out for a few days and then fly to London. It's a shame that I'm not going to have time to go to Greece.... the bit I really wanted to explore was the Greek Isles. I spoke to Cynthia (in Berlin) who had worked on a Greek tour boat, and she said that most of the places had already shut down a month ago! I'm planning to leave Greece and Turkey to a trip of their own... maybe with some other eastern european countries. The other trip that I might do is Holland-Belgium-France-Spain-Portugal. Will definately have to earn some sizable pounds before I embark on them!
So... Chinque Terre was really great. Lisa and I managed to do the whole 12km walk in one day! It was pretty kewl. Basically the only rest I'm getting from big walks these days is train rides! Today I stopped at Pisa, wandered around and took some photos. Seems like there's basically only the tower to see there. The Lasagne was nice though!
There was a soccer game between La Spezia and Pisa (exactly where I was from and where I was going to) so the train ride to the tower was really busy! Also, the stadium is just near the tower, and so I could hear all the soccer fans singing! It gave the tower touristy area a rather different feel! So I decided to catch a slow train to Florence, cos it would be really empty... and I wanted to sleep!
So... yepp trains have been my only rest recently. In Luxembourg I was climbing up and down tons of hills, roads, bridges and steps. Then I had one day on the train, and I climbed for two days in a row in Interlaken - can't remember if I told you where... We caught a train to Laudabrunnen (my spelling for all these places will be wrong), then walked along a valley to another small town (canět remember the name), then up to Gimmewald... there was snow on the ground before I got to the top. We had lunch at this hostel... brought all this food and snacked... then walked to Murren and caught a train then funicular then train back to the hostel. Was a good walk... I think we started from 900m and went up to maybe 1450m... so quite a lot smaller than the climbs in Poland and Austria! Nice alps around and tons of photos though. I'll have to post some photos of Alex, Wit, Peter and Scott that climbed with me.
The next day I was hanging with these kewl guys from South Africa (whose names will appear here shortly when I can spell them!). Peter from the day before joined us, and we climbed Harder Kulm, this small mountain near to Interlaken. We had to climb up and down though... we started early, ate lunch at the top, and were able to get down to the bottom, and have a walk to the ruins of the local fortressy castle thing.
OK... so I walked for those days, and then went to Chinque Terre, walked for the whole day... then slept on the train from Pisa to here. In my hostel room, I saw Zac, who I'd originally met in Munich! I went out with him, Eric, Nick, Carissa and Kelly, for dinner, and to this after party of the Florence Marathon that was run yesterday!!! It was pretty wild... after getting home (before the 1am curfew... grr!) I was on the net till 3:30am uploading all those nice photos for you...
So today... Eric and I just walked around and had a look at some sights... will write about them later. Tomorrow there's these really good gardens that are huge... more photos will be taken!
So, the best thing about Florence is the food! I went to Marios restaurant for lunch, and ate some chicken, pork, fries and salad - and polished it off with some biscotti, dipped in sweet desert wine... !
Then we went to the markets nearby! I stocked up on sundried tomatoes, and made these really nice mortadella cheese sundried tomato sandwich things for dinner! mmmmm!
OK... gotta go!
:-)
Posted by Sam at November 25, 2002 08:25 AM