France and Italy so far

Nov 6^th

            We are in Nice, France. We have spent the last two days raveling. We got on a bus from Barcelona, Spain to Marseille, France. Marseille ended up being this huge uglly city that we weren’t too stoked, and it was raining. So we ended up spending the night in the train/bus station there because it was dark and rainy outside. France is much more rainy than we all expected in turn it ends up being more pricy because we have to sleep in hostels. So we weren’t too stoked on Marseille so we all decided to go up the cost to a small town called Antibes. We took a 20 euro train ride there the next day. We spent a couple of hours checking the city out. We cruised into an internet café to find a place that we could ditch our bags and spend the night. We found a camping place online, that was a couple miles out side the city so we headed there and on our way we found a better place where we ended up setting our tent up at and ditching our bags. We dropped our bags off and checked out this huge castle fort thing across the road. After a few hours of checking stuff out it started to pour on us. That shut everything down, we had to go take down the tent and grab our bags. I found a little wireless internet site and we found a cheep hotel in Nice. This town is a quite bit bigger but we got two rooms and dried all of our stuff off. We bought some pasta and meat sauce and are having a substantial meal. It was good to sleep on a bed tonight, but we have definitely splurged. L O well. We should be good to go for a little while.

 

Nov 7^th

            So today we spent most of the morning cruising in the hotel, showering, munching then we strolled down the boardwalk taking pictures of the water and the beautiful sights. We walked up to the top of the little hill that separates old town and younger Nice. From the hill you can see everything. You can see the water, all of Nice and on the hill there is a little park that has a base ball diamond and some restaurants on it. The sun started to go down and we caught some amazing pictures of the city and the water! Josh went to an internet cafe and Clay and I went to room. We packed four guys in a three bed room which was supposedly “forbidden”. So we let Clay come and visit us for the whole night which was ok. So Clay and I had a long discussion about the rest of our trip and how we were going to have to take a stop out of our trip. We cant see Venice, I guess that is because it will cost us an extra $200 to go that far out of the way. So instead we are going to see Pisa which I’m stoked on. Downloaded another batch of pictures to my computer again today, I think I am at around 2000 pictures. I was looking through them and realized that I has a bunch of gunk on my image sensor. So I took a cleaning cloth to it in the bathroom. That was a battle, I set my shutter speed for a 20 second exposure and was cleaning it while it was open. I blew on it once and got a bunch of spit on the image sensor and I was freaking out because I though I ruined my camera forever, the chunk was not rubbing out and I was thought I was done for the trip. So I fogged it up with my breath then rubbed it out. I came out and I ended up getting everything off of my image sensor, for now. I was getting knarly chunks of something on my beautiful sun set pictures. I loaded all the pictures to my computer and was analyzing them, found all of the almost ruined because of the stuff that was on them.

 

Nov 8^th

            Today we woke up and cruised out of the hotel in Nice and packed our stuff all across town looking at Nice. Nice is a really really cool town. It has a super cool old town feel to it. There are tons of  narrow, little streets that have tons of little restaurants on them, tucked back in the corners of the city. The streets are more like hallways city, hallways that lead to like squares that are the rooms of the city. Every square we came to had a thriving market in it. These markets where lined with (outside eating) restaurants. Some  fruit markets, fish markets, arts/craft markets, everyone strolling through, restraunts serving some of the best food I have ever seen.  Bakeries, delis, fruit markets…yeah I was digging on it for sure. Clay was taking pictures consistently and in a frustrated tone explaining how he will very much be spending most of his “vacation” time in this city while he is going to school in Greece.

            So the day kinda came to an end with us seeing Aaron off, he was heading to spend the night in this monastery that has been converted into a hostel. We said our goodbyes and that was kinda sad to see him off, the dynamic is so different now that he has left. We said good bye at the train station and headed out to Monaco/Monte Carlo for the night. When we got here we found this little ledge that was under a bridge, we stashed out bags there and checked this ridiculously plush/posh city out. We checked out the huge casino that was all decked out with more nice cars than a car show. We walked through the harbor that was full of million dollar yachts. Then we saw this weird little carival that was going on so we strolled through that. Finally we got some food and cruised back to our little spot where we stashed the bags. The wall that separated this wallk way was only three feet talle but was up and like 15 feet away from the walkway. So I had to look out and make sure that no one was coming while Clay and Josh set the sleeping quarters up. Covert op Sniping session on the most wealthy place I have ever been. The whole contry of Monaco, all 20 blocks of it is just so pricy looking the place is kinda ridiculous. It is a monarchy and has a king that rules everything…it was kinda llike going to Disneyland.

 

We traveled all day yesterday, we started in Monte Carlo. Monte carlo is this city country that was kind of like Las vegas on some foreign European steroids. It was weird, so we woke up from our little nook of a sleeping spot and strolled through the city/countryone last time and headed for Italy. I think it is the first foreign country I ever wanted to visit . I grew up hearing a lot about Italy from my cousins and grandparents. Its just so crazy to be here!

So we took the train from Monacco to Genoa, Italy then we got a ticket to Pisa. The train skirted the Mediterranean most of the trip, but I just spent time soaking in the country side. The trip from Monte Carol to Genoa was just water to our right and cliffs to our left for a couple of hours. Once we got to Genoa the train went inland and the countryside opened up. We could see the Alps, there were a bunch of marble mines coming out of the cliffs. Everyone has a vegetable garden, a big garden.  It is really homey feeling. We got to Pisa and we were starving! So we grabbed some Pisa pizza right off the train. Then we got some Italian gelato for desert. We wandered around around the city looking for a place to stash our stuff. So everyone absolutely everyone ws out and about for some reason . we were walking around and there were people everywhere, small little markets were set up and in the middle of the street. Clay and I bought a scarf/turban wrap thing. We found a place to stash our stuff and then we saw a camping sign so we followed that until we got to a field where we were figured we could camp/ from there we scoured the streets of Pisa looking for an internet place so Josh could get in touch with Mallory. Josh was pretty focused on that but clay and I got distracted by all of the cool market stuff and we got separated from Josh. We found him but by that time everything was closing up so we headed back to the field and set up camp for the night. The field we are staying in is like a marsh thing.

Josh mentioned he was kind of getting sick of sight seeing. Two weeks of jumping around seeing sights is a bit monotonous. We are getting on this schedule of training, finding a place to stash stuff sight see or eat or internet cafe, set up camp and stay for a few days, sight see some more eat internet next train to the next place to do it all over again. Each place is so different its amazing! But while we are taking pictures Josh is left with nothing to do other than hold stuff, so it is draining on him to sight see. It takes us three times as long to see because we are taking pictures of everything.

 

Nov 15

             I haven’t journaled since the second day in Pisa. While I was journaling last Josh was getting caught up on time with Mallory and Family back home. He spent I think four hours on the computer which was a record, it was good for all of us to get to talk with people back home. Clay and I hung out in a coffee shop and just chilled listened to music. Then we rolled through Pisa and checked out the markets and shops, Clay bought a satchel, we met our Mormon buddies. We one kid was from Billings, Montana one was from Washington, another from Colorado, and then there was one from Salt Lake City, Utah. We had a good little chat with them about home and other parts of the world, apparently “Racism still exists in Africa”-Elder Actbar. They were stoked to see us they thought we were homeless and were stoked to hear that we were heading around the world.

            The next day we just cruised, woke up late, packed up our stuff. I got some really good apple chips from this supermarket near by (side note). We grabbed some food, cruised into this laundry mat and discussed religion for a bit. Then we cruised down to the train station and headed out for Florence. It was raining in Florence when we got there. They have a huge train station but it was much larger of a city feeling than Pisa. We cruised out of the station and asked this information booth about camping nearby and they gave us a map and some directions to a campsite. We wandered around the streets of Florence trying to find the place and got lost for about 30 minutes. We were hungry and drenched and found it! It was $11 Euros per person so we stayed there for a bit. Then cruised out to get some legit Italian food. We found this nook little restaurant and got Tortellini. Each one of us got a plate and it was sooo good! I was so so glad, it turned the mood of the day around. We woke up and cruised the streets of Florence. There is this really cool Cathedral that we took pictures of and got to see the inside of. There are some really neat places in Florence, cool architecture. Our campsite is placed on top of this huge hill overlooking all of Florence. That night we got some food and cruised back to the campsite early. We hung out in the bathroom for hours singing and talking about old times. When we were in the tent we spent hours talking about old relationships, friends, high school. I remembered some stuff that I totally forgot about high school. It was soo so good to talk about that. I felt renewed in a really different way.  Then we went to sleep for like 6 hours and woke up so a soaked tent and soaked sleeping bags, soaked bags everything was pretty much soaked. So we cruised up to the bathrooms and dryed all of the stuff from our bags with the hand dryer. I took an hour shower cause I could, and we put our sleeping bags in the dryers that they have. So we hung out for a couple hours ate some food, let the rain die down and then we took the tent down and put it in the dryer on a low setting. So we left with most of our stuff dry. We decided it was time to leave Florence we couldn’t see the city while it was raining. So we got a ticket to Rome. We took the campsites brochure because they had another site in Rome. The brochure had directions from the train station so we took the undergroud Metro and a bus to the campsite. It was dark and it just got done raining when we got there. So we set up camp checked the place out. Josh got McDonalds while we were waiting for the bus so clay and I couldn’t resist. We checked out the restaurant on the campground and bought a 5 euro pizza. The pizza was so so so good.  We each had one and I loved it! I was pumped. We went to bed and woke up, took a shower and headed down town to see Papa Pope. We payed like 5 Euros to go to the top of this huge chapel bordering the Vatican. From there I could see like 50 to 70 miles in either direction. You can see allllll of Rome on a clear day from there. I took amazing pictures which I hope to have ready for you guys. But we met this guy who was stationed in Germany, from Kansas, went to school in New York with the Army and he talked with us a bit about his life, his study of art history, and we cruised with him for about 30 minutes before he took off somewhere and we never saw him again. But after that we went to the lower part of the Chapel where all of these dead Popes were and the supposed relics of St. Peter… who knows. After that we went into the actual Vatican city/country and almost ran through what seemed like miles of museum. The Popes from long ago just loved to collect old art so there was stuff from hundreds what seemed like thousands of years ago, Egyptian relics, thousands of tapestries, paintings, statues, busts of famous people,  miles of rooms with paintings all over the walls, like famous paintings. It all ended in the Sistine Chapel and Michangelo’s depiction of the Creation of Man through the Last Judgement. I don’t know it was pretty mind-blowing in terms of art, it made art seem pretty unappealing to me. I even got to see a bunch of Dali paintings but it was still like this schnobby artsy like im the pope so I can own that, feel. And that just made it all seem like it wasn’t that priceless. If we were to put a price on the art that was done in there I am sure it could be anywhere in the hundreds of Trillions of dollars but that seems to make it all the less important. I don’t know, it was exhausting seeing everything and I was ready to leave, so we cruised on down to the McDonalds that Josh ate at the night before and we spent 4 euros each and got milkshakes, hamburgers, and fries…it was good…american J.