Viareggio!

Mediterranean, the town, the mountains

This past Saturday a group of about eight of us decided to take the train up to the town of Viareggio, a small beach town right on the coast of the Mediterranean. Since it's been basically 80 and sunny every day, we figured we shoudl get to the beach while it lasted. We tried to catch a train that left at 10:41, but since Sesto has the most confusing train station in Italy, we missed it. It was actually on the platform we were on, but we got confused and didn't get on. Anyways, we took the next one a little after 12:00, and it took about 1.5 hours to get there. The ride up there was really cool, just seeing all the mountains and hills and small Italian towns. One of the best parts of the ride was that we passed in a tunnel underneath a mountain. It was pretty ridiculous, the pressure changed instantly so your ears were on fire, but it was interesting none the less. We finally got there around 2 and spent a good 5 hours at the beach. The town of Viareggio itself was a really cool town. It was just this smaller, beach town, that kind of looked like something you'd see on the coast of Florida. One of my buddies on the trip said it reminded him of a scalled down, less rowdy Miami. But it had palm trees all over the place, and we had to walk about 15 minutes to get from the station to the beach. Which was just fine, because they had this boardwalk going on all along the beach, with a ton of little shops and restaurants along side of it which is pretty cool. Here's a picture of the town itself and the start of the boardwalk.

So we finally get down to the beach. All along the beach they have these private areas that you have to rent out if you want to get a beach chair / umbrella going on. We decided to check out the free beach, but it was real small and most of us didn't have towels, so we rented a spot on one of the private beaches, which was only like 5 euros each. Not too shabby. I'd have to say I was dead on in expecting a ridiculous amount of Euro Spedo action going on at the beach. Also, some of the people there (not from our group, just to clarify) took part in the euronudity at beaches as well. So the stereotypes were definitely confirmed. Shortly after we got all settled and such, we decided to swim in the sea. It was still really warm for September, but the swimming got cut short on account of jellyfish. One of the kids in our group was kind of far out in the water, and said he saw a fairly large jellyfish chilling right by his side, so he waited for it to float away, then we all took off out of the water.

So most of the day we just spent lounging on the beach, walking on the boardwalk, getting somethign to eat, and enjoying the view. The view was unbelievable. It combined a number of my favorite geographical features in one location. 1) Palm Trees. 2) Beaches of large bodies of water. 3) Mountains. Not just like the hills we're used to seeing here in Sesto. But legit, snowcapped mountains. It was great just chilling in the water and looking over your should at some snowcapped mountains. Pow. Anyways, there's a picture of my pasty self in the waters of the Mediterranean.

Siena and San Gimignano

I probably just had myself one of the best weekends I've had in quite some time. It all started on Friday with an organized day trip to Siena. I was skeptical at first because it didn't look that interesting on Wikipedia and what not, but I was definitely wrong. Siena was about a 1.5 hour busride away, but the city was amazing. It is a really old medieval city, with a ton of tiny alleyways and sidestreets, two gigantic cathedrals/churches, one large civic building with a really tall tower, and this huge civic square right in the heart of Siena.

Facade of the Cathedral

The day started with a tour of St. Dominic's Basilica. We couldn't take pictures inside the place, but it was pretty cool. The Basilica was gigantic, and was famous for housing the head and finger of St. Catherine. It was really weird, both face and finger were really deteriorated and shrivled. Anyways, we then went on to tour the Cathedral in Siena, which was possible the most unbelievable building I've ever been in. There was so much detail put into building this thing. Even the floors displayed various scenes in Marble. It was huge, and the amount of art and statues that was in this place was just ridiculous.

Floor of the Cathedral

I got a whole mess of pictures of this place up on facebook too. But it was really cool to get a chance to go into this Cathedral. I still can't get over how old all of these places are, and how they possibly could have been made this beautiful at the time. Next, we had some time on our hands, so we wandered around Siena, bought some vino, and hung out for a good chunk of time in this huge city square. It was more like an octagon, but this place was gigantic, just a big wide open space for people to hang out in. I guess at one point in time they had horse races around the square, not too sure if they still do or not though. That's pretty much how Sienna went.

Shot of Siena

After Siena, we all then went to San Gimignano. The bus ride into this town was really cool because we were driving straight through the Tuscan countryside. Just a whole mess of hills and vineyards, which was a lot more interesting to look at than driving on 94. San Gimignano was probably my favorite part of studying abroad so far. It was just this really old town in wine country that had a ton of really nice shops, restaurants, wine cellars, etc. And the views from it were pretty amazing. Just overlooking all the vineyards and the countryside, it finally kind of made me realize that I was in Italy for good now, and not just like a week long vacation. We didn't really do a whole lot in San Gimignano, but I think just the views and the fact that it was just an authentic, Italian city made it the best stop for me thus far.

One of the views from San Gimignano. Pictures really can't do it justice.

The only thing we really did there other than admire the views and walk around the town was stopping at the "world's best gelato shop." They weren't joking. The line was extremely long and went pretty far out the door, but it was definitely worth the wait. By far the best gelato I've ever had. I'm going to be quite unhappy when I come back home to the states and all we have is shitty eddy's and kemps. This place was amazing, can't even describe it. I had a combo of lemon, wildberries, and some kind of blackberry. When I inevitably win the lottery, I'm definitely going to be importing a disgusting amount of that gelato to wherever it is that I'll be living at. So that was our Friday more or less. Saturday a group of about 8 of us went to the Mediterranean to this town called Viareggio. That was a blast too, but I'll put up a post about that excursion when I get the chance.

Sorry!

Sorry for the lack of posting. This one is going to be super short. I'm going to try to get a post up today about our trip this past Friday to Siena and then to the town of San Gimignano. This was easily my favorite day I've had since I've been here, and definitely saw some unbelievable things. I'll hopefully be able to get a post up about it sometime today, but if not I have a ton of new pictures up on facebook from the trip so check those out for the time being.

 On Friday we all took a walking tour of Florence as part of orientation. And this was the first sight we saw. It was absolutely unbelievable to have this amazing view of Florence from a distance be the first thing for all of us to see. Florence is a great city. There's definitely a lot to do and to see and to eat, and it's super busy. But it's not hard to find quite side streets either. All the streets are super narrow, and everything is really old. It was pretty weird thinking that a good chunk of stuff that I was seeing was built before America was even a country. There's a ton of piazza's and churches and art galleries everywhere, and a whole mess of random statues that are really cool scattered about, like this one:

This picture was taken from one of the main squares, Piazza Della Republica I believe, but I'm not positive. We pretty much just saw the big land marks on our walking tour, the big squares and outside the Duomo, the big cathedral shown in the opening picture. There's a ton of gypsy's hanging out all over Florence, but especially in the squares. Just theiveing and begging the day away, it's pretty absurd. They look and smell exactly how you'd imagine gypsy's too as well. But the very first thing we saw on the tour was this really cool 13th centry Benedictine Monastery. It was unbelievable to just see that place and how old everything was, and how decorative the Monastery itself was. Just kind of made you realize you're definitely not in America any more. Here's a picture from that as well

We saw some other cool stuff, and had some pizza while we were down there as well. It was not too bad, but today we were down there for class which I'll talk about later, and we stopped at this really old pizza place. It was far and away the best pizza I've had since I've been here, and maybe the first pizza I've had that has been better than Punch in the twin cities. Legit. Walking past the Duomo was really cool as well. It's ridiculous to think that people were able to build something that large with that unbelievable amount of detail so long ago. The Dome of it was actually made without scaffolding, which seems next to impossible. It's hard to describe the place itself with words, so here are some pictures instead. They don't come close to describing the detail and representing it. It was maybe the most impressive thing I've ever seen in my life.

This is Part of the facade of the Duomo. Couldn't fit it all in.

So that was the Duomo. We also went to the residency as well as the church of Dante, the man who wrote the inferno among other things, so that was pretty cool too to get a chance to see that. Also, a group of us went to the Academia art gallery where the house Michealangelo's "David". This thing is GIGANTIC. I thought it would be more life sized, but it's easily like 10 times as large as myself. It was the most impressive work of art I've ever seen. To think of someone chizzleing that much detail out of a block of marble is unfathomable. The detail of the hair is unbelievable. Unfortunately, you could not take pictures of it. So you'll just have to look it up online. But it was amazing. There's a lot more I'd like to say about Florence, but this is getting long so I'm going to be done.

Sesto Fiorentino

I've been here for almost a week now, and it honestly still feels like I'm about to hop back on a plane and go home. The first week has been a lot of fun. The town of Sesto Fiorentino is about 6 miles from Florence, only about a 20 minute bus ride into town. I wish I had some pictures of Sesto to put up here, it's a really cool town. There's a lot of little, narrow streets and a fair amount of restaurants, shops, gelato, and things going on. The first night (Wednesday) it was a kids birthday here, so we all got together in the basement and had some beer and wine and such then went out into sesto. There was a carnival going on in the main city square, which has basically been going on ever since we've been here. There's a big stage where the play music and have some type of performances going on, with an outdoor beer garden sort of place close by. On Thursday night me and two other kids actually talked italian with these bartenders for close to two hours, so that was really neat to get a chance to do that and speak some italian to actual italians. They actual own / work in Sesto pub, which is right on the sqaure and has unreal pizza. We've been there a couple times already actually. We've also found our gelato hotspot I guess, it's right next to the main square as well. It's unbelievable. Gelato blows ice cream out of the water. hands down. The flavors are so good and it's definitely lived up to, if not exceeded, all the hype. We've spent some time just roaming the city as well, and it's actually pretty big, so Sesto itself has been a pleasant surprise.

There's also this supermarket close by called Essalunga. It's about a five minute walk away and I've been there almost everyday. The beer / alcohol / wine prices are unmatched. I've grown fond of this Italian brew called Birra Moretti. You can get a six pack of those bad boys for 2.50 Euro. And it's no keystone light / busch light bs either. Wine's ridiculous too, there's always sales of different bottles for 1 Euro, and they're not half bad. There's also groceries and snacks there too.

We ate dinner outside last night which was kind of cool. Just a whole mess of appetizers. We had this thing called a zucchini flower, which was like deep fried zucchini with some kind of sugary coating. Really good. The served us wine with dinner too, which they claimed they never would.


The first day of school also was yesterday. My classes seem really interesting and really easy, a solid combo. There's so much downtime over here too which is really nice, so the evenings have consisted of a lot of hanging out / watching movies in the basement. There was fireworks sunday night as well in Sesto, which were pretty cool. Can't really think of much else. I'll talk about our two days / night in Florence as well in the next post. Again, appologies for no pictures of Sesto yet, they'll come sooner or later

First couple of days in Italy

Apologies for the lack of updating, things have just been pretty busy ever since I got here. Everything has been amazing so far. It still honestly feels like I'm about to hop on a plane and head back home in a couple days. Class starts tomorrow though, so that should probably take care of that feeling. There's honestly so much I want to post about, so I'll probably split it up into three posts, one tonight, one tomorrow, and one the next day. The villa and the town of Sesto Fiorentino itself has been absolutely amazing. One funny thing is that there's a lot of animals running around our villa.
1) Lizards running around everywhere
2) PIdgeons
3) Ducks in the fountains
4) Bats outside
5) The mosquitos here are terrible. Way worse than back at home. Hella bug bites
6) Helen (the villa supervisor) has a really old golden retriever called blake. Italian dogs bark differently, believe it.
7) I've seen 3 different stray cats
8) A chicken
Here is a picture I took of the villa.

 The Villa also has these unbelievable gardens laid out everywhere. It's pretty ridiculous that I'm living in this place. Here is a picture of the gardens

It's really cool just because there's all these statues everywhere and paintings and frescos all over the place. And they have really old lemon trees that they're always talking about how we need to be careful for them. Pretty strange.

The meals have been fantastic. We get three meals a day monday through friday, nothing on saturday, and brunch and dinner on sunday. Meals so far have included really good pesto pasta, penne redsauce pasta, tortellini, roast beef, this really good chicken, really good roasted tomatoes and cheese, really good potatoes, etc. The bar has been set high. It's like eating out at a restaurant every night. Everyone I've met here so far have been really nice and easy to get along with and what not. They all were kind of in my situation, just looking for something new and not knowing anyone that well going into the trip. We've all kind of wandered around Sesto, which I'll talk more about in the next post, and on Friday and today spent most of the day in Florence, which I'll talk about in the post after the next post. Hopefully I'll get all of these up in the next day or two. But so far it's been great. A lot of new experiences, and it's been a lot of fun. Still hasn't really sunk in that I'm here for 3.5 months. Until tomorrow,

Matt

Airplane Food Blows

So here were are, finally in Sesto! We had our first night out tonight. After our first dinner. There's about 50 people in the program. We all sat down and had a fantastic dinner together. THEN, it was a birthday night tonight so we went out to downtown Sesto, which just happened to be hosting a large CARNIVAL! It was pretty fun, we all had a good time. But to get more on topic with my post. Here are some general likes and dislikes of the whole traveling abroad scenario.

LIKES)
1) Ben Stiller (how he looked like Ben from the movie zoolander, sat beside me the entire flight, and even helped me with my backrest. awesome.
2) Having a brew with a fellow Wisconsin student in the Frankfurt airport. It was my first legal purchase of alcohol. At 10AM. It was fantastic
3) Me not loosing baggage
4) Flying over the Swiss Alps with a glass of Red Wine in hand. Someone honestly should have painted a portraite of that moment.
5) The maps on the TV screens that showed where the plane was in progression to its final destination.
6) The new airports and airplanes. obvskies.
7) Traveling 640 MPH, at 39,000 feet, and over 4,000 miles
DISLIKES)
1) NOT being able to sleep at all. as of now I haven't slept for almost 48 hours
2) The girl behind me that kept pushing my reclined seat up.
3) Transfering
4) The frankfurt terminal
    A) It's so confusing. But the best part is is that they have these "camel smoking terminals". Essentially glass boxes where you go to smoke cigarettes and all. They're honestly as popular in German terminals as coffee shops. I almost took a picture but everyone was looking.
5) THE INFLIGHT FOOD. Terrible. The served some sorry excuse for chicken teriyaki. It was rubbery. And half of it was hot while the other half was cold. Bad news bears. Why can't airplane food just serve chicken tenders or something like that?

There is my airplane update. The Florence arrival / villa night one post will be up within the next day or two!