Trains, Planes, and Vespas

July 21, 2014

Trains, Planes, and Vespas

Its a beautiful night in Rimini, we are a block away from the Adriatic Sea and you can hear the beach life as we walk to a late dinner downtown. I love the walkability of everything in Italy. It seems that wherever we stay we can get where we need to be in a bus ride or an eventful walk (eventful = watch out for the dog shit that no one picks up…my Birkenstocks have been shunned to the porch because of this). Back to accessibility..the bus and train system in Italy and throughout the rest of Europe opened my eyes to how travel at home is so much more unavailable and difficult. I can buy a train ticket and be across the country here at the price of 50 euros and 3 hours in a somewhat air conditioned train.

but anyways!

I can't believe were already 10 days into our tour of Italy and I finally remembered to try and write my first blog post…its been so busy! This was suppose to be a practice run for when I head to Spain in January, but obviously I'm not as organized as I had thought. We still have another 9 days left (or so…I couldn't tell you what day it is let alone what time we're heading back to the states). The small amounts of new perspective alone have made this trip worthwhile if it wasn't worthwhile enough with all of the AMAZING pasta dishes. It is a bit overwhelming as far as family time goes, I'm used to being at college with my own room, people my age, and choices. Here its about sharing rooms, a variety of ages, and the forever fun "GROUP DECISION".

On the train rides I do my best to make conversation with the people in the seats around me, almost all of the italians under the age of 30 have a great grasp of the English language (Don't get me wrong, plenty of the older adults do as well). In most of the schools they are required to learn English in addition to one other language of their choice (French and German are common) so by the time they reach graduation they are fluent. Its disappointing that there are almost no language requirements in most american grade schools/ high schools/ and colleges compared to here where you graduate knowing a minimum of three languages just from high school! How are we, as Americans, setting ourselves up to be global citizens when we are letting the rest of the world learn how to cater to our need without any motion of trying to learn how to respond?

I am majoring in spanish but it still seems inadequate to their requirements!

I will be forever grateful to the string of Italian ladies for being patient while trying to understand my gelato order in broken Engtalian (eng-talian??). Especially in Rome where the names seemed to be particularly complicated to pronounce <3

Enough about how we don't compare. Italy is gorgeous! After flying into Milan we drove to Torino where my eyes were opened to the charm of the cobblestone roads and history that every corner in Italy seems to ooze. I can't help but wonder how old the most "historic" building in green bay is..I don't think I want to know but I'm sure it couldn't be more than 200 years old. (Here I go comparing again) To give an example of the easily accessible history- a few cities, 3 train rides, 800 scoops of gelatos and 5 billion mojitos back we were in a city in the tuscany area called Lucca. We biked along the renaissance era city wall. The town became a Roman colony in 180 BC. ONE EIGHT ZERO BEE-CEE.

I have to start unpacking but here are a few pictures from each city so far!

MILAN: NO PICTURES. I lied. I was way too tired to take any pictures, I'm surprised I made it out of the airport and into the correct van in one piece.

TORINO: