London to Florence 27/28

I don’t think that I have ever found myself in a country where I have so little means of communication. I feel almost fluent in Spanish now that I realize how bad my Italian is. But, unfortunately, this fact didn’t occur to me until I landed in Bologna, Italy, yesterday afternoon. Before I get to that though, I think that, once again, it is worth describing my journey to the said location.

I woke up that morning at 7, got on the right metro for London Liverpool Street and arrived with few troubles. The next step was to get a train ticket for the airport, but, as luck would have it, the train was down for the day due to reconstruction. I asked around and eventually found a bus station with buses headed to the airport that came once every half hour. Of course, the bus pulled away just as I arrived. One thing I am much better at now, however, is not getting too upset when things like this happen. I took some deep breaths, realized that it was all out of my control and searched for means of entertainment until the next bus/train/plane/ect. arrived.

I flew out of the same airline that I came in on – RyanAir. This time, however, I had accumulated another bag, which I was planning on putting under the plane. The bag had some of my snow stuff such as pants, jacket, gloves, ect and weighed all of 2 kilograms. The cost to bring it on the plane? An extra 35 euros. So that meant that I had to get creative. I put my jacket and pants on and found little places to hide the other stuff and, looking like I was about to jump off one of those helicopters and start skiing, I boarded the plane. Upon landing I took everything off and put it back into the bag, but it was a pretty toasty plane ride.

So now we are at where I began this blog, Bologna. Like I said, this was the first time I realized how little Italian I actually knew – two words: gratzi and bonjorno. I knew what I had to do to get to Florence, but like all travel in Europe, that proved to be more difficult than I would have desired. I somehow was able to find a bus from the Bologna airport to the Bologna train station and from there I purchased a train ticket to Florence. The first ticket I purchased was for a train out of a different station, however, so I had to repurchase another one which was 20 euros more. The train ride wasn’t bad though, only about an hour, and this time I actually had the address of my hostel and a map from the station to the hostel. It still took some exploring, but with help from a tourist office, I was able to find it without the help of a taxi.

Last night there were two other people in my room, both of whom were traveling together from Boston. We went out to dinner last night and then explored the city, amidst a good deal of rain, today. Four new people just moved in and they all speak Spanish as their main language, so its pretty cool being able to have conversations with them. Tomorrow I have tickets for the Academia (apparently a pretty famous art museum) and I leave for Switzerland on Wednesday.

Also, I am trying to put up pictures because I have a lot but my camera won’t connect to the computer! I will continue trying because right now this blog looks like a book and is in some serious need of beautification.

Italian words that I now know:

Prego/a – used for everything imaginable

Cerna – can be used for hello

I am learning! Jajajaja

1st photo - The famous Florentine Duomo Cathedral (first to use a dome like structure - which you can't see here jaja)
2nd photo - 2 very strong men... must be gods or something