Florence, Italy- January 20th-21st

We were supposed to catch a train after class at 1:45pm on Friday to Milan, and then another to get to Florence; however, our first train was 25 minutes late. So once we got to Milan our train to Florence had already departed. Milan was a huge station, and we had no idea what to do to get a ticket for the next train because all trains in Italy you have to make reservations for because they are always really crowded. The bad thing about that is we paid for our euro rail, but we still had to pay 48 euros to reserve both trains there and back. I luckily was able to find someone at the train station who spoke a little English, and she ended up actually being a student at USI as well. We stood together in the assistance line to try and get a ticket for the next train. Thank god she stayed with us because the ticket officer did not speak any English so she was able to translate to him why we missed our train. We weren't able to reserve seats though because other people already had our seats, so we luckily were able to sit in the restaurant portion of the train for the two hour ride. Once we got to Florence we found our Hostel, which was only like a 3 minute walk from the train station. We got so excited when we arrived because we say price signs for things that were so much cheaper than what they would be in Lugano; although you have to remember Italy uses the Euro which is more expensive than the franc compared to the dollar. We got to our hostel which ended up being a very nice hostel, checked in our room, and went to the hostel restaurant for our free dinner. You had an option of pizza, pasta, or salad, but the pizza looked the best out of all the options. Just like Interlaken, our hostel was FILLED with Asians. I think we were like 1 of 5 white families all the rest were Asian. Since it was around 8pm when we finished dinner we decided to just walk around town for the remainder of the night. We walked around and saw the beautiful and famous duomo, cathedral, and bell tower at night. Everything in Florence is very central, which is nice because you can easily walk to see all of the famous structures. I can't even put into words the beauty of the dome and cathedrals. I literally stood at the foot and just starred for a good 5 minutes. They used green, white and pink marble to build the structures; I've never seen anything like it before. We continued to just walk around the city and explore. Bryce found an irish pub which we decided to go into, but it ended up being pretty sketchy filled with scary looking men. So we left and decided to just get gelato. It was my first time eating gelato and it was amazing! After that we just went back to our hostel and called it a night. We woke up around 8:30 got free breakfast at the hostel then got ready for the walking tour. Our hostel provided a free walking tour from 10-12. The tour was the part of town on the other side of the river, which was good because we weren't as familiar with that part of town. The tour guide told us a lot about the history and took us to some really beautiful palaces and churches in Florence. We walked across the Ponte Vecchio bridge, which is full of rich jewelry venders. After the tour we did some exploring of the town ourselves. Some of the squares had markets full of vendors selling purses, scarves, jewelry, etc. I ended up getting this gorgeous Italian leather red satchel which I really needed because the satchel that I brought was too tiny to fit all of the stuff I needed to bring for a day. -->Continued on the next post