Italy

So first of all, I am sorry this is so delayed.  Second, the keyboards here are a little different and it is really hard!

Florence –

Florence was wonderful. It had more of an old town feel and was a lot smaller than Rome.  Shelby made me choose whether I would live in Rome or Florence and I chose Rome – who would have thought.

More favorites –

1. Secret passages tour in Palace Vecchio – there was all these secret staircases and rooms that we walked through.  A painting was opened and we walked through it to another secret staircase! 

2. The David – so incredible

3. The neighborhood cafe next to our hostel

4. We made friends with two girls who were travelling together. Mary was from Mexico and Jing was from China and they were studying in France and vacationing in Italy.  They were quite the pair and we loved them. 

5. Irish pub where we made some friends and watched the Florence Championship football game.  It was very exciting!

Venice –

I loved Venice.  This city is like nothing I have ever seen before.  There are no cars and the streets are either alley ways or canals.  The hostel we stayed at was so great as well.  We made friends with everyone staying there right away and ended up spending our whole time in Venice with them.  The owner of the hostel, Lapo, loves Lady Gaga and on our first morning there he was blasting the same song on repeat from his computer for about a half an hour.  It was quite funny.  We have found Europeans really like Lady Gaga.  We picked Laura up at the airport so now there are three of us!  My favorite thing we did while in Venice was ride a gondola.  It was enchanting and everything I hoped it would be!

Quick update – we abandoned our plans to go to Croatia which was hard and a little sad but the only scheduled train taking us to Zagreb would get us in at 4am and then we would still have another bus ride to our destination that would last 11 hours.  So we altered our itinerary and are now in Austria…which is nothing like I expected and quite wonderful.