Hiking through Cinque Terre

Yesterday, we spent the whole day hiking through Cinque Terre.  Cinque Terre is iconic Italy.  There are 5(cinque) towns(terre) that are tucked away in different parts of the western coast line of Italy and you can get to all of them by hiking through the trails.  All of them are small towns with colored houses, narrow ally ways, and have views that are out of this world!   It was quite the hike and we were exhausted by the end, but come December, I'm bound to have legs of steel.

 I hope this picture doesn't make anyone too jealous (those in Michigan)   :)

 The second town that we hiked to, it truly is beautiful...the nice weather obviously helps with that too.

 Our seafood lunch/dinner that we had.  Everything is caught fresh daily from the coast.  I tried stuffed mussels for the first time, which were great!

 There is something that is so empowering about the sky and sea!  One of the best sunsets I have seen.

 Just about everywhere in Europe, lovers will fix a lock on a fence or bridge, symbolizing that their love will never break apart.

Even the rocks are beautiful.  I think rocks are my new favorite part of nature.

Doin' it like the Romans did

Last weekend we had our first 4 day school field trip to Roma.  I took so many pictures (probably upwards of 2000) that I had a hard time deciding what to put up.  I loved everything in Rome.  There is soo much to see that I literally got 'tired' of taking pictures, yes it is possible.  As much as I loved Rome, I love living in Florence better.

 The courtyard of the Vatican Museum

 St Peter's Square and Basilica

 The front altar area of St. Peter's

 The painting in the top of the dome

 I can finally say I took the famous picture of the Colosseum! 

 The Colosseum lit up at night

 The Pantheon...not the Parthenon

 The oculus at the top of the dome.  The Pantheon is an open dome structure so the inside is filled with natural daylight, the sky is washed out in this picture, but its so awesome to look up at the sky when you're in here.

The library at Lateran University that we visited.  Why can't we have a library like this in America?!

Sorry for the delay....

I haven't updated my blog in a long time...but school kicked in a little bit, so I was pretty busy these past couple weeks.  It's hard to believe that Sunday will mark me being gone for a month!  (Let me tell you, it has not seemed that long at all!)  This weekend starts our school field trips around Italy.  Rome is first on the list and I can't wait!  But go ahead and take a look at what I've been up to.

A Trains Planes & Automobiles weekend to Napoli, Capri, & Pompei

The title says it all....I felt like I lived that movie this weekend.  We left for Napoli (Naples) Friday morning at 6 am on the train to visit Pompei, and the island of Capri.  Napoli is like the Detroit of Italy, except the dirtiest city that I have ever been in.  People literally dump trash out their window and it smells pretty bad.  That is one part of Italy that you don't need to spend any longer than a day or two in, even though the people that live there would think differently.

We left to come back on Sunday at 4:30.  We had a connecting train from Roma to Firenze (Florence) and should have arrived back home around 10 (it’s about a 6 hour train ride).  We were about 30 minutes out from Napoli when our train stopped at a station in the middle of nowhere.  Everyone was clueless as to what was going on, but apparently there was a fire on the tracks ahead of us.  So we were stopped at a platform for 4.5-5 hours, which caused us to miss our train back home.  We thought we were going to have to "bum it up" for the night and sleep on a bench because everything is closed on Sundays here, none of us had any cash on us (just cards), no WiFi access on our smartphones, and our international phones were about to die.  We learned a lot about traveling this weekend!

Long story short, we ended up making it back home at around 2:30 am...and it never felt so good to be back home safe and sound!

Here are some pictures from Napoli.  Capri and Pompei are farther down.  Enjoy!

 The view looking out from the balcony of the hostel that we stayed at.  Notice the streets are cleaner because it's morning.  By the end of the day, they are covered with trash!

 A castle that is here on the sore of Napoli.  We couldn't go in it because it was Sunday and under construction.

They aren't exaggerating when they say Naples is home of the Pizza Pie.  We went to L'Antica Pizzeria Da Michele, which is where Julia Roberts ate when they filmed Eat Pray Love.  This was the best pizza I ever put in my mouth, sometimes I dream about it when I'm really hungry at night.

Capri/Anacapri....just a ferry, tram, bus, and chairlift ride away

We went to Capri on Saturday (9/1/2012), our ferry left at 6:30 from Naploi.  Unfortunately the weather the whole day was overcast, cloudy and rainy at times.  I was lucky to get these pictures, because I soon discovered that my camera was going to die during some part of the day.  It was a gorgeous island, but expensive obviously!

 Morning sunset from the ferry/cruise boat docks.

 After a hour ferry ride, you will finally reach the island of Capri.

My first legit Italian breakfast.  They keep it simple; plain omelette, slices of tomato and fresh mozzarella cheese drizzled with olive oil and some type of green leaf lettuce.

 Houses and shops up in the middle town of the island, called Anacapri.

 The church in Anacapri.

 We took the chairlift up the the highest point of the island.  Look at how blue that water is!

 Me at the very top, and the other part of the island below.

 Just a closer up view of the other side of Capri.

 Take a look at this yacht!

Ridin the chairlift back down.  Along the way there are houses and vineyards.  Lots of lemon trees are here, as the island is famous for its Lemoncello.

Still pretty good for being a cloudy day!

A place with so much history

A picture of Mt Vesuvius taken from the train.

This is the entrance to Pompei.

The Basilica square.

One of the Bathhouses...the tile work in here is amazing! 

Me on top of some ancient ruins.

A courtyard in one of the many villages here.

A panorama of the amphitheater at Pompei. 

Pompei just after sunset.  By far my favorite picture taken!