Spain and Italy

Well, I have put off updating this for far too long. My trip to Spain and Italy was AMAZING. We went to Valencia and Barcelona in Spain, and Venice, Rome, and Palermo in Italy.

Valencia was first, and it was beautiful. The beaches were gorgeous, and the building of the old quarter where we stayed were really neat. We even got to climb up a castle that used to be the entrance to the city. Also the weather was wonderful while we were there: blue skies and 70 degrees. One day we went to the aquarium there and got to see a dolphin show; it was so cool!We also went out and had a traditional Valencia meal--paella. It was delicious. Probably the strangest thing about Valencia, and Spain/Italy in general, was how different their sense of time is. We went out for dinner at 8 or 9, and that was still early by their standards. We wandered around the plaza de la virgen at 1:30 am and the place was packed. Some of the clubs we saw advertised didn't even open till 2 or 3 am. Crazy.

After Valencia was Barcelona. I liked Barcelona compared to Valencia, mostly because Valencia was a very chill place, not a lot of tourists. But in Barcelona the atmosphere was totally different: very busy and lively (and touristy). We wandered Las Ramblas one day, which is the main touristy street in Barcelona. It's actually a sucession of five streets that are connected, and it's basically tons of shops, street performers, cafes, and markets. I also saw the Sagrada Familia, a famous church, as well as many Gaudi buildings. In Barcelona we met up with other people from the London Centre and walked along the beach at night before heading out for tapas and a flamenco show.

The least fun part of our journey was trying to get from Barcelona to Venice. It took us about 12 hours of ridiculous travel; we took the metro in Barcelona to the train station, which didn't take us the airport as we thought, but to some random bus depot which then took us to the airport, which flew us into "Venice", which was actually a bus ride away from Venice, the bus then took us to the outskirts of Venice where we had to jump on a boat to get to the island our hostel was on, which we then had to try to find in the dark. Yuck. The next day was very wet and gray, but it was amazing to see the city on water. We basically just wandered around, checking out the sights.

From Venice we went to Rome, which started out horribly due to a downpour and no umbrella and no idea where our hostel was. However, once we found our hostel things cleared up a bit and we went to the Vatican that day. The next day we got to see quite a lot by foot because a) it was somehow gorgeous out (it was supposed to rain, thank god it was sunny) and b) Rome is much smaller than I thought. We saw the Colosseum, the Pantheon, random ruins of ancient Rome, the Trevi fountain, the Spanish steps, and a bunch of other places I can't name from memory. We also had really good pizza and gelato while there. In fact, we got kicked off of the Spanish steps due to our messy gelato. Oops. Oh-another interesting thing in Rome was a huge march that weaved all through the city. 100,000 university students from all over Italy were in Rome to protest the new privitazation of the schools. At first we would just see lines of armed police blocking streets, and we didn't know why, but eventually we ran into (and kept running into) the marchers.

Our final stop was Palermo, Sicily. Getting there was also interesting; at first when we looked up trains from Rome to Palermo we were concerned because it's a 12 hour trip and we really didn't have that much time, but then we realized we could take an overnight train and the timing would be perfect. Yeah, good in theory but our train was uber sketchy and just weird in general. And we were woken up at 7 am, despite having another 5 hours of traveling. Once we got to Palermo, things were bad for a bit because we could not find our hostel. It was ridiculous and frustrating; the numbers on the buildings made no sense and there was no visible hostel. Eventually, we found the entrance to our hostel which was all torn apart and messed up. Then we took the six flights upstairs (even though apparently it's on the 3rd floor) and finally found our hostel. Depsite it being difficult to find, it was one of my favorite places. It was actually more like a B&B, and the owner made sure we had maps and recommended places to see and was all around the sweetest man ever. Sicily wouldn't have been nearly as good without his help. Anyway, the city of Palermo was neat; there were cool churches, another gorgeous beach, an interesting catacomb, etc. But my favorite part was taking a bus ride up to a village of Palermo in the mountains, overlooking the sea and the city. It was breathtaking. We also had dinner with another guy from our hostel one night, which was interesting because we had no idea what the menu said and literally picked things randomly and got a surprise meal. It was delicious though. And I got a canoli from this really fancy bakery while there, which was also delicious.

Overall the 10 day break was extremely hectic (5 cities in 10 days will do that), but it was SO worth it!