What a weekend! Rebecca, Olivia, Brittany and I visited Pisa and Milan together and had such a great time (and did some damage to our credit cards...oops). But first I need to go back to Thursday.
We had class at 9am and has a little adventure trying to get to the meeting point. We met at the entrance to the ancient Roman Forum on a street called Via dei Fori Imperiali. It was basically in between the Trevi Fountain and the Colosseum. Our teacher got there a little late so we ran across the street to a cafe to get some breakfast (I had a cafe latte and an egg and tomato panini). We finally found our teacher (or rather she found us) and the four hour class started. While four hours is way to long of a time to ask for my attention, the information was actually really interesting. We learned about the Roman Forum and all the different rulers who built them. The forum basically was a public meeting place and served public functions (trade and markets, etc). Most of the material was imported from Egypt and other places because Rome's materials were not sturdy enough. There was the forum of Nerva, who was a god. The ruins from the Forum of Augustus, Forum of Tragian and Forum of Julius Caesar were all there and we learned all about that. We also got to go into the Capitoline Square, which was the head of ancient Rome. Inside it is a museum of ancient roman and greek art.
What is really cool is that the G8 is in Rome this past week and the wives of all the Presidents had lunch at the care where we had lunch on Thursday. Olivia and I saw Obama's car dive by last week...that was pretty cool. We have seen a lot of protests around Rome from the G8 meetings and the school sent us an e-mail telling us to carry around our passports in case we get stopped by cops and to be careful when we go out. Also, what I noticed is that most of the taxis drive the new prius hybrid and all of the taxis are stick shift.
Thursday night I got to see Jay and Devrah (friends of my parents) and their girls. They treated me to dinner, which was really nice of them. I had a great time and I was really happy I got to see them!
When I got back from dinner I packed and then Rebecca and I went out with the boys to Campo de Fiori and got back late so getting up at 745 am for the train was not fun. Rebecca, of course, was the last one downstairs but we still love her. We bought our train tickets and had an hour to eat so we went to a cafe in the station to get breakfast. It is a good thing Olivia looked at her phone because all of a sudden we had 5 minutes to get to the train! But we made it :-) Our tickets were double booked so Olivia had to sit in the hallway but the little cart that we sat in was SO HOT that I joined her. We finally made it to Pisa but we were all exhausted and went straight to the hotel to freshen up. Our room wasn't ready yet when we got there so they held our luggage for us while we went down the street to get something to eat. Rebecca and I shared a pint of wine which made me automatically feel much better! We got back and our room was ready so we went to put our stuff away and take care of our Switzerland trip. The weekend we decided to go to Switzerland is a holiday so we wanted to get everything booked as soon as possible to make sure it did not fill up. After like 2 hours of dealing with a crappy internet connection and our student discounts not going through we finally got the trip booked and we are all very excited. We then went back to our rooms to shower and nap.
At 6:30ish we finally were on our way to the tower. It was still light out so we got to take pictures with the sunlight. The four of us fooled around a lot with our cameras and took some fun pictures. We bought tickets to go up to the top-a little pricey but definitely worth it. The view was absolutely spectacular (see attached pictures). Around 10:30ish we headed into town for dinner. We found a cute little restaurant in the corner of a side street of a piazza. The food was good and afterwards we got gelato (of course). We went into the middle of the piazza and sat on the bridge and ate our ice cream. When we were done we walked back to the hotel. This one guy who kept staring at us started to follow us and we freaked out and got ourselves lost in the crowd to try to lose him. We all had our phones set to the. equivalent of 911 just in case but luckily we lost him and got back to the hotel safely. That night we slept like babies because we finally had air conditioning...we were so happy to not be sweating in our sleep (our apartments don't have AC)!!!
The hotel had a complementary breakfast (although the whole complementary thing is carp as far as I'm concerned). It was actually pretty good-the first time I had eggs since I have been here. We stole croissants, fruit, and crackers from the breakfast to take on the train to Milan. We made sure this time that our seats were not double booked and were next to each other. We had a cart to ourselves and all fell asleep on top of each other. Four hours later we were in Milan...the fashion capitol of the world! At the train station we hailed a cab and told him the address of the hotel. He looked at us funny and told us that the our hotel was right there and pointed across the street. We were sooo embarrassed! We had to get out of the cab and get all our luggage out.
We went to the hotel, freshened up, took our credit cards and were on our way to shopping in the most expensive city everrr. We really wanted to go to all the high-end stores like Gucci, Prada, etc (not to buy, just to be part of the atmosphere), but we also wanted to make sure we got some shopping done so we settled for the cheaper end. Brittany did some major credit card damage haha. I didn't spend too much money because I want to be able to buy stuff in Florence and Paris (and maybe even Switzerland).
For dinner we looked in my guide book for recommendations. We picked this local restaurant that wound up being a little out of our budget range but worth every single penny. I got a pasta dish with vegetables and it was by far the best pasta I have ever had in my life! It was definitely hand made. Brittany and Olivia shared a seafood dish which as also to die for and Rebecca had some really amazing risotto. Afterwards we couldn't help but to order dessert. We were tempted to steal the dessert cart and run away but the fact that we wanted to stay in Italy for the next 4 weeks stopped us. We split a piece of amaretto cake with chocolate pieces in it and a lemon meringue with nutella on top. AMAZING!
We really wanted to go out but we were in a more suburban area where there were not a lot of people out and we did not know where all the young people went out so instead we had a cab driver drive us by a wine store, got a bottle of wine and went back to the hotel and had some good old fashion girl bonding.
In the morning we checked out, bought our tickets back to Rome at the train station, and got breakfast. Finally, we were on our way to Rome. This train was a nicer train (we paid a little more for it) and the four hour trip went by super fast. I slept for a while and read for class. We got a small bottle of wine towards the end just for fun because we had nothing else to do. This really hot british guy got on at one of the stops and we spent the rest of the train ride just staring at him. He totally noticed but we did not even care-it was as if he was the last guy on earth. We were a bunch of kids in a candy store...it was pretty funny.
We got back to Rome around 4:30 and went back to our apartments. Brittany and I both passed out. Once we finally woke up we went over to Oliva and Rebecca's apartment to eat and work on our project. We spent the rest of the night just hanging out and now we are all in our separate beds going to sleep. This weekend was a great weekend. We didn't do any partying but I really got to bond with the girls and fall even more in love with them. I am so lucky to have found such great girls on study abroad! I love that we are old enough to appreciate how ancient Rome is and how much history there is in Italy and yet still go out and have fun like a bunch of kids.
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