The Magic of Travel

This weekend I journeyed up to Florence with some classmates in an attempt to see more of Italy as well as just get out of Rome. We realized that we were about half way done with the quarter and it just seemed like every weekend was changed to just-sit-and-relax-time, which is stupid because who knows when I will have a chance like this again. We planned to leave on the early train on Saturday so that we could be in Florence early enough to make a full day of exploring, and our plan was to get tickets for the late train out Sunday night. As with any big trip, you run into little glitches along the way that just make the trip more hectic and, in a way, epic. The start of this little story begin with me and my friends (most of the people going) deciding it would be good to party out Friday night (especially since it was the end of our Italian class that day). Half of our traveling party was part of the large group that went out to some dancing party (which I guess was kinda lame) whereas my friends and I decided to dine out at what turned out to be a really tasty Indian restaurant, drink, and hang out. Our little dancing party, though a little sad at 6 people, was a lot of fun and made our evening into quite the fun time. The down side here was that the party didn't really wind down until 3:30ish and by the time we had taken the ladies home it was now about 4:30 in the morning. This all with our train leaving at 6:50 across town. So, I decided to just go without sleep when most everyone else tried to squeeze in some shut-eye. As a result, I was the only one to be ready on time, and so we all started our hasty trek at about 6:15! Running across town we jumped on the train heading to Florence, accidentally ending up on the slow train, rather than the Eurostar we had paid for! This slow travel was actually pretty nice though since we all slept for at least a little while on the ride.

Into the city, we met up with a woman who was friends with my friend Acacia's aunt. Turns out she is an art historian and told us where to get student cards which let us jump through the museums faster and see just about every famous piece of art you could imagine. What an adventure! While in Florence we also got to dine at a really great Mediterranean place, a good cheap pizza place, some awesome gelato, and the key piece - a damn good Mexican restaurant! To make the weekend even more incredible, we went wine-tasting at one of her favorite places and ended up sampling 7 wines and getting some chocolate for 22 euro a piece (when it should have been like 30+ from the wines). Perhaps the best part of this journey was that she also put us up in her home, so we got to enjoy all that amazing stuff and not pay a cent for lodging! Simply put, this was my best weekend in Italy. Can you believe our luck?