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Evviva l'Italia!, part one | Thursday, April 3, 2008 | 39 CommentsI got back from my senior trip to Italy, so prepare for the next posts to be filled with stories and pictures! I made about 150 pictures myself, but only at the beginning of the trip. My batteries went out and I couldn't be assed to replace them. I suck. But don't worry, I have a friend who made over 600. Well, he actually made over 1200... but accidentally deleted all his pictures about halfway through the trip. He was completely distraught, it was the saddest thing.
Enough talk about pictures - Italy! I'll start with giving you a map of how far I'd been before going to Italy:
An on a world map:
Pathetic, isn't it? Note how I almost tripled that distance by going to Italy!
Day one: Ghent > Milan
We travelled in a bus 600 miles from Ghent, Belgium to Milan, Italy. That means I actually went through 6 countries in one day: Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, France, Switzerland and Italy. Pretty cool, huh?
The bus ride was long and boring. We watched a few movies first (Pulp Fiction and Ratatouille) and then played Truth & Dare. Considering there isn't much room for dares in a bus, most of it was truth - meaning we basically exposed our entire sex life when we were sitting two seats behind the teachers. Joy.
The drive through Switzerland was exciting, though! I'd never seen mountains before in my life. I tried to take some pictures, but most of the quality sucks because of being in a moving bus and all that. :P Here are the best ones:
We arrived at about 8pm in our hotel in Milan. The hotel was... interesting, to say the least. Let me put it this way: If one of you ever feels like enjoying the services of a call-girl and doesn't know which hotel to go to, just give me a call, 'cause I have the perfect address. The room my friend and I slept in was covered in mirrors, the most noticeable being a huge, round mirror on the ceiling above the bed. We also had a jacuzzi in the bathroom! Turns out we got the fancy room - another friend of mine had a pole. Yes, an actual *pole*. At first when I heard it, I figured it had to be some sort of architectural thing, but it happened to be on a stage in a corner. Plus, the only light in his room consisted of a disco ball. And other people got, wait for it, chains (!) attached to the corners of their bed.
Seriously, I'm not even kidding. I haven't got pictures of the pole or the chains, so you're gonna have to take my word for that, but this was our room:
Needless to say, we spent our evening pole dancing, bathing in the jacuzzi and playing strip poker. Fun times.
Day two: Milan > Rome
Another day spent in a bus. We watched movies... again. We played Truth & Dare... again. We did make a short stop at a cute little city called Orvieto. It was on top of a hill, so you had to reach it by this totally awesome rollercoaster-like thing!
The view from the city itself was pretty amazing, too.
There was a church and a bunch of cute small streets:
One strange thing about Italy was that you'd see signs showing the direction towards Rome, EVERYWHERE. We actually saw one in one of those little streets - just a totally random tiny street where cars weren't even allowed, and it had a sign saying "Roma, 128km". It was hilarious.
We arrived in our hotel in Rome that evening. The food sucked. The service sucked even more. There were about 3 people to serve 150 hungry teens - and those 3 people apparently weren't in a hurry at all. I swear I'd never seen anyone walk that slow before. It generally took us about 2 hours for us to eat.
Day three: Rome Rain
We were *supposed* to see the Ancient Rome. What we saw was a bunch of mud. I always thought the weather in Italy was supposed to be sunny, but apparently I was wrong.
We saw the Colosseum first, and around that time it was only raining a little bit...
When we got out, though, it was already raining enough for me to go and buy an umbrella. One hour later, Rome was transformed into a swimming pool. I didn't feel like drowning my camera, so I don't have any pictures of that, but it just happened to be Easter - so there were tons of people gathering around the other side of the city to see the Pope give his blessing, or something... and I found a picture of that:
Notice the enormous amount of umbrellas. Belgium is pretty much famous for its rain, but this just beat everything. We saw the Forum Romanum, but all I could think was "Shut up and give me a pizza!" while I tried not to step in a puddle - though sometimes it was simply unavoidable. And then after seeing the Forum Romanum, me, my boyfriend and another friend lost our group. So there we were in the pouring rain, trying to find our way in city we'd never been in before. It was like Hell, only wetter.
By noon, though, our teachers had actually gathered some common sense and decided to let us go on the bus again for a tour around Rome. Which I'm sure would have been fun if I hadn't been soaked down to my underwear and was trembling for three hours straight... I've never enjoyed a shower more than that evening in the hotel.
Well... this blog is getting fairly long already, so I'm going to wrap it up now. More later, of course! On a side note, I'm adding all of you people who asked for link exchanges, and thanks everyone for all the lovely comments!
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