Sun. 09-16-07 -- Monterosso, Pisa, Florence, and Rome, Italy
This morning we got up at 7:30 am to pack up and catch an 8:45 am train. Our plan was to end up in Florence for the night with a short pitstop in Pisa. As the location of this entry shows, things didn't go exactly as planned!
We caught the train out of Monterosso, and arrived in Pisa around 11am. We checked our bags at the train station and figured out how to catch the bus to the tower (the tourist information office was closed, so we were on our own to figure it out). A bunch of other people must have figured it out because the bus was completely packed! Fortunately it was a short ride, and then we all filed out into the Piazza.
We didn't stay there long, just long enough to take some pictures of the tower, and walk right up to it. The tower is leaning pretty far, but it's about what I expected. It was neat to see, but it was mostly just a checkmark on my list of things to see before I die. We hopped the bus back to the station and tried to catch the next train to Florence which was leaving in 15 minutes. Unfortunately the line at the bag check slowed us down, so we ate McDonald's (they are in almost every station) and waited 30 minutes for the next train.
The train to Florence took about 1.5 hours, and on the ride over, I discovered that Accademia (where David is) is closed on Monday (tomorrow)! This was the main thing we were coming to see in Florence, so we had to hurry over there today as soon as we got in town! We didn't have a room reserved in Florence, so we checked our bags at the station and walked over to Accademia. As we walked up, I noticed big closed doors and an 8"x11" piece of paper taped to it. The paper said "The gallery is closed due to striking workers." The whole reason we came to Florence, and we can't see it! It was pretty annoyed so I said "F*** Florence, let's go to Rome... I mean if they won't even open up their museums..." I fear it was a rather American thing to say, but then I'm a proud American, so there!
We walked back to the train station, but passed by the Duomo on the way. Florence was crazy crowded and the tourbooks said it was pretty expensive, so I'm glad we left (sour grapes). We got back to the station and looked at the board for the next train to Roma. We didn't notice the express at first, so we thought we'd be waiting around for an hour. I was playing with one of the ticket machines when I noticed that an express (it would get us to Rome in a little over an hour) was leaving in about 15 minutes.
We ran to the ticket counter and got reserved seats (they were required), now we had 11 minutes. We ran to the bag check and got in line to get our bags, now we had 6 minutes until the train left. When I was second in line, I asked the guy in front of me if I could go first because our train left in FOUR MINUTES! He said sure, so we got our bags and RAN to the train as fast as we could! Fortunately we were in the first car, so we got on with 2 minutes to spare... SHEW!
The ride was nice and quick and around 5pm we showed up in Rome. We didn't have a place to stay, so we started wandering around. The first place had no rooms available. The second place only had dorm beds available. The third place only had a 3 person room for 140 Euros (ouch). The fourth place had a decent room with a private shower (toilet down the hall) for 65 Euros! We took it, but it was only available for one night, so we still needed to find another place. Because we gained a day on our itinerary (no Florence) we had to play with our schedule to see how many more nights we wanted to book.
This opened a whole can of worms, because the whole next section of our trip (Amalfi coast) was completely unplanned and was on my to-do list to figure out. While we were doing this, we figured we should nail down our Italy night trains too, so we could book them ahead of time... So basically we spent our fist night in Rome figuring out the next week of our trip. We decided to stay with 3 full days in Rome, and use the extra day in the Amalfi Coast/Mt. Vesuvius area. That meant a night train form Naples to Venice on 9-23 and a night train from Venice to Switzerland on 9-25.
With this stage planned out, we were eager to actually reserve these tickets. We walked to the train station, and we played with the electronic ticket machine until we had found exactly the trains and times that we wanted. Then we went to the ticket office (waited forever in line) and booked our next two night trains. Both of these will be in couchette rooms of 4 (our last night train had 6 beds) so that will probably be nicer. The only bad thing is we are arriving in Venice at like 5:30 am! I don't know what the heck we are going to do until everything opens, it should be... interesting.
We got the trains booked up (138 Euros) by 8:30pm so we walked outside to see if we could find a room for the next few nights. But it was getting late, the streets were a little freaky, we were hungry, and we could only find one hostel, so we gave up and had dinner instead. We found a little place, where I had pizza and Kara had tortellini. We finished our dinner, then went back to our hotel to shower and relax. Tomorrow morning, we have to figure out where we are staying, and I'm still not sure what we are going to see!
