Italy Trip Part 6

Last part everybody. Yes in this installment I being my Italy trip to a close. Let's get started.

This was about a block away from the hotel. When we got lost we would ask people how to get here, then go to the hotel once we arrived. It seemed safer than telling strangers what hotel we were staying at.

We went for a lovely walk. We stopped to take pictures of many things including the Ponte Vecchio. Then the lovely walk turned into a death march up a huge hill/small mountain because there was (surprise) a church at the top. Also some great views of Florence.

 Like this.

 And this. (I think I can. I think I can.)

 After more trekking we got to this beautiful shot.

 This is me playing around with zoom. Seriously we were up high.

We made it! Anyway the next 10 or so pictures are just of my friends and I being silly. (Taking pictures of each other at the same time, extreme close-ups, shenanigans and what not). We shall continue this little photodiary...

On the way back down.

Back on... we weren't at sea so I can't say solid ground. Back on sea level ground? Whatever, we were done with the hill/mountain.

Anyway, that little hike was actually a last day in Florence activity. The next day we drove to Milan where the airport is. We didn't go straight there though. (Or maybe we did. I don't know the exact route. The point is we made a stop.)

It's Parma. I'm not sure if there are any universally recognized features to Parma equivalent to that tower in Pisa, so I put a picture of the clock tower.

We just hung out in Parma for a few hours. Looked around, got some cheese and olive oil.

The meet up park had some nice police/military people. I'm pretty sure they arrested a creepy looking dude near us. Also, some people found some pigeons and followed them around for a while.

The restaurant where we has lunch provided some opera singers for us. They were really good.

So, I've mentioned being a little immature before, but bear with me, I found this hilarious.

 There was a sign in the bathroom giving directions for using the toilet. I think my favorite is the third one where the guy just dances away.

In case you don't want to have to read the directions.

Anyway, we then left Parma and went to hang out in Milan for about an hour and a half. What do you think we did while there?

Did you guess that we visited a church? Yay! 10 points! (And an extra 5 points if you knew we visited, wait for it, on Good Friday.) BTW the points don't matter. You can't exchange them for anything.

We also saw this cool statue of Da Vinci.

So that wraps up the trip pretty much. We stayed in the airport hotel that night, then flew home the next morning.

My overall summery of the places that we went is as follows.
Rome grabs you by the lapels and screams "appreciate me! I'm old!"
Siena invites you to sit down and have some gelato while it tells you facinating stories.
Florence basically lays it out, "If you promise to look around and notice all the cool old stuff here I promise to keep you safe from cars.
Lucca is adorable and wants a hug.
Pisa says, "Hey you've seen the one really famous thing, now why don't you stay and look around a little more? Please?"
Parma invites you to dinner with its cheese and olive oil and prosciutto.
And Milan basically says, "I'm an important city. If you want to look around fine, but don't blame me if you get hit with a car. I have important fashion things to do. Don't bother me."

Italy Trip Part 5

Florence was amazing. I liked Florence a lot. Much of this had to do with the fact that cars are banned from much of Florence so unlike Rome where I almost died everyday, I could walk without fear in Florence.

Also, our hotel was right next to a Disney store. HOW AWESOME IS THAT?!?!?!

Right, Italian culture time.

 It's either the Palazzo Vecchio or it's right next to the Palazzo Vecchio.

I took these pictures standing on the Ponte Vecchio on the first night of Passover when there was a full moon. These pictures are some of my favorites.

When we visited the Palazzo Vecchio one of the things we got to do was make our own fresco tile. This was one of my favorite parts of the trip because as fun as it is to go and see the different churches and museums, after a point a church is a church. It's great to get to have experiences that are hands on as part of trips, to get to live the culture as well as see it.

 More ceiling paintings. This is of the heads of the De Medici family. It is painted on the ceiling of the room where all the important meeting took place.

 Coolest thing about castles? Secret passageways!

Which in this case lead to a way to spy on the proceedings in the room where the official meetings occurred. The queen liked to spy.

We visited the grave of Beatrice (the one Dante wrote about). I knew she was a real person, but since we read about her mostly from a fictional book it's fascinating to visit her actual grave.

So we ate dinner near this spot and noticed they were setting up for something. It turned out that the TRL awards for MTV were taking place there the next night. We got permission from our teachers to go and it was so cool. And by cool I mean crowded. And in Italian. But still it was fun. Also I later found out one of my cousins was in Florence at the same time and was also there, although we didn't run into each other. *Starts humming "It's a small world after all"*

The next day we all hopped on a train to Lucca for a day trip.

 Everyone had bikes there.

 This is a church we visited. By the time we git here the churches weren't impressing me quite as much, but we'd also been seeing a bunch of them everyday.

 Another very pretty rounded town circle.

 We stopped at this cute little street market. It was pretty much the only thing open because, as Greg pointed out "[Italy] is adorable because everybody just goes home and takes a nap in the middle of the day" (Might not be the exact quote but close enough).

Guess where Pucchini is from! Did you guess Lucca? Yay, you're right. No there's no prize. So after lunch we went on another train. Guess where we went.

That's right, Pisa. (Still no prize.)

Obligatory tourist shot.

This was just something cool I saw in Florence.

So two quick things that I apparently don't have pictures for.
1. We did go and see the David and a bunch of other artwork/sculpture. However, we weren't allowed to take pictures so I don't remember quite what order we did those things in. I just want to say, of all the art we saw, the David by Michelangelo was one of the only things that I felt I couldn't really appreciate until I saw it in person. Most of the other art I found just as impressive in the pictures of it as in real life, but the David, something I'd seen images of before blew all those pictures out of the water.
2. I mentioned the whisperers before. One night in Florence a little before our going to bed curfew, (but after the be back in the hotel curfew) the teacher's started to go around telling us to meet downstairs at curfew time. They said it was serious. They seemed angry. They wouldn't really tell us what it was about. I honestly thought someone had been found drinking and was being sent home. We were told to bring our whisperers with us.

When we were all gathered, we were told that since some people kept arriving late and missing curfew they didn't believe we'd be able to do a tour they'd been planning for the morning because we'd be too tired, so we would be doing it right now at night. There was a lot of complaining at the people who were late. We walked about a block or so away from the hotel to these beautifully adorned gates and were told to get close so we could really see them.

All of a sudden, music began to blast through our whisperers. All the teachers were laughing. They were giving us a silent dance party (because we were the only ones who could hear the music). It was one of the most fun things, dancing in my PJ's in Italy, to music only my friends and I could hear.

Italy Trip Part 4

As we drove from Rome to Florence we stopped in Siena. I have to say, I think Siena was my favorite place we went to on this trip and I wish we'd gotten more time there.

 First view of Siena. So pretty.

Pretty much all the streets in Siena slope downwards towards the center town circle. It means it's pretty hard to get lost. (Since I got lost a lot on Rome I appreciated this)

 The buildings in the town circle are actually build to be rounded. It's visible on both buildings, though I think this second picture makes it a little clearer.

Every year the different sections of Siena send a horse to the center circle and they have a race around. The district that wins goes on to have a big party. My favorite part about this race is that the horse can win even if the rider falls off.

We saw the most adorable puppy eating a cone. Needless to say everyone in the group promptly stopped listening to Dr. Texas and focused on the puppy. He's so cuuuute!

 The Duomo.

 I loved this shot I got of the stained glass from inside the Duomo.

 We found this clothesline while we walked around Siena. Clotheslines are actually better for the environment than dryers.

One of the streets that sloped down was very steep. This little restaurant had outdoor seating with specially slanted tables and chairs so that people (and food) stay upright. So I got a picture of myself sitting on one of them.

Since I had the shot of the puppy eating a cone (though there was no gelato in it) and since this has been a shorter post I'm going to write a little about the gelato I had in Italy. It was really good. As in, I didn't want to have ice cream for a little while after I got back because I was afraid it would just taste awful in comparison. (I've since gotten over it thought gelato is still amazing!). I found a lot of gelato places had flavors similar to American flavors (chocolate, mint chocolate chip, strawberry) some more commonly seen as sherbets in America (mango and other fruits) and some I'd never seen before (Tiramisu, Nutella and stracciatella). The stracciatella was sort of like chocolate chip except it was so much better. I seriously had some gelato everyday. It's amazing. One of the cool things about gelato shops is that unlike America where if you want multiple flavors it cost's extra or is just done more rarely, in Italy it's expected that you are getting two or more flavors at once on your cone/in your cup.
 
Now I want some gelato and all I have is plain old ice cream.

Italy Trip Part 3

Okay so this part starts with the Vatican.

Yes that one. With the pope. Whom my friend Monika decided to start writing a movie about. (It's called "The Pope and Me". It's an adorable story and a group of us worked together to make a little theme song for it's opening credits.) Anyhoo... Who likes Michelangelo?

I had two pictures of this and the lighting wasn't great on either one. This one was slightly better lighting so I choose this.

I loved how amid all this classic renaissance art in the Vatican there was also this really modern looking piece.

Here's some of that typical Vatican-y art you were all expecting.

Somehow my argument that the Pope let people paint on his ceiling didn't do much to convince my parents to let me paint my ceiling. That fact that I don't have the ability to make it look anywhere near this good should be irrelevant.

Cool shot using a window as a mirror. Dr. Texas pointed out that we could do this.

Back in Rome, a nice scenery shot on the way to dinner.

We also passed these on the way to dinner. (The Spanish Steps guys)

I loved the Trevi Fountain. I think I got decent lighting on this despite it being night. And henceforth dark.

It's the pumpkin dome. Can you guess why?

 The next day we went to the Colosseum.

  

This is the less famous view of it from the inside.

A bunch of people playing Ninja nearby the Colosseum. It seemed fitting at the time. Also, the reason everyone has an earphone it is because we had these devices called whispers that allowed Dr. Texas to tell us things about what we were seeing with having to be loud in museums. He spoke into a little microphone and we heard him in our ear. We also heard it when he coughed into the microphone. That was a weird experience. These come up in another fun story from Florence.

This is supposedly the cave where Romulus and Remus were originally raised by the wolf.

So that's it for Rome. Tomorrow, Sienna and (maybe) a bit of Florence.