Italy 2010: FLORENCE!!

After missing our train to Lecce, we were all pretty bummed about not being able to go to “the Florence of the south.” Gabe was especially upset because Lecce is where his dad was born. We boarded the train to Florence at 9:30, and arrived at 12:30. We got off the train, and I immediately called Debbie, in the girls group, to see which hostel they were staying at. Besides the obvious problem of wasting money on train reservations and buying new train tix, we didn’t have a hostel booked for that night either. they were staying at some hostel near the train station, and Debbie told me it was nice. I followed Rachel’s directions from the train station towards the hostel just long enough to get us completely lost. Adam took over, and after circling a few more times, we eventually made it to the train station. Luckily, they had rooms available. We split up three and four, with Seffi, Seth and I taking the three. The hostel was nice as the girls said, nothing super fancy but not bad. There was a computer in each room with super slow internet, which was nice. It also had free wi-fi throughout. We put our stuff down and went to find some lunch. Of course, we ended up at another pizza place! As expected, the pizza was very tasty and overpriced. After pizza and gelato for dessert, Adam and Gabe, still in chronic depression from missing Lecce, went back to the hostel to chill out. the five of us went for a walk.

We started at the Duomo. The duomo was beautiful and huge, but was closed due to mass. That was a familiar story. We then made our way to the David statue. The David was unbelievably breathtaking. After admiring the statue for a long time, and seeing the rest of the statues, Seth came over to me and said, “Josh, there’s a musical instrument section! Have you seen it?” I almost full-on sprinted to find it. I walked in and was greeted by a huge, 14^th, century harpsichord. ‘So THAT’S what a harpsichord looks like,’ I thought to myself. It was pretty small, but stil amazing. There were a few super old cellos, violas, violins, horns, trumpets, trombones, drums, clarinets, serpents, flutes and pianos on display as well. Also, there was a real Stradivarius violin on display! Mr. Brame, my band director from high school, talked all about these ultra-rare and expensive violins during music theory class. It was a fantastic experience at the museum.

After, we made our way back to the Duomo, a church that took 140 years to build! According to Ricky, it is the 3^rd largest church in the world! Next to the Duomo was a Ben and Jerry’s store. I freaked out a little bit when I saw it (I LOVE Ben and Jerry’s!!) anyway, the Duomo was still closed, either due to Mass or just because they’re mean. Whatever.

Next, we went searching for the Jewish Ghetto section of Florence. It took way longer than it should have, but we found it. The synagogue looked sooooo cool. Unfortunately, it too was closed. So I was only able to get some pictures from behind the gate. It was depressing that it was closed, but still cool that we saw it. Then, we followed Nadav back to the hostel. We were all pretty tired from waking up at 6AM. Adam, Nadav and I watched zombieland in the room. It was pretty gruesome, but really funny as well. Ban hour and a half of relaxing was alli needed to get my energy back. I needed it because that night was round 2 of fancy dinner night with Adam and Gabe.

The three of us left the hostel around 8. We walked down the street for about 15 minutes before finding a cool looking lace called Ciro and Sons. It was sooooo good, and the atmosphere was great too. We enjoyed another fantastic 4-course meal. Before we knew it, literally, it was 10:30 PM and we were sitting at dinner wondering where the night went. We made it back to the hostel by 10:50.

Gabe and I wanted to walk around the city, and Joey and Seth decided to join us in the excursion around Florence I really just wanted to see Florence at night. Unlike Rome that had a distinct main street, we didn’t know if there was a main street in Florence. We quickly discovered that Florence was not anything like Rome. It didn’t matter though, we wandered in and out of random convenient stores, candy shops and other random places. We even ended up back at the Duomo during the night. We walked back to the hostel and were asleep by 12:30.

Day 8:

Wake up at 9. We enjoyed a nice breakfast at the hostel with the girls group considering we were at the same hostel. We said good-bye to them and were out the door by 10. We said bye to the girls and made our way to the Leonardo Di Vince museum. At the door, Adam and Gabe split up from us to go see the David. Us five entered the museum. It was three rooms full of his inventions. As I walked in, I heard a familiar voice. I instantly recognized it, but refused to believe it. I turned the corner to see Asaf and Jesse looking at some display. The whole other guys group just happened to be at the same museum as us. We explored the small museum, played with the inventions together, and were the only people there the whole time. I really enjoyed hanging with them again;. Jesse and I caught up a little bit as well. After about an hour of messing around there, we said bye to the group and made our way back to the hostel to get our bags. We met up with Adam and Gabe at 11:45, and got to the train station by 12:05. We had already reserved seats for the train that morning. I grabbed some more Italian pizza and headed to the train where, as I’m writing this (not typing it, obviously), I am sitting next to Gabe. We’re rockin’ out to our own personal The Who marathon from my iPod (and, as I’m typing this, was more fun listening to them on the train then when they played at the superbowl…. Ouch!)

Tonight is Shabbat in Venice. Should be a good time. I’ll write more later!

-----Now in real time: HI!!! We finally arrived in Yerucham. I’ll write more later, btu I don’t wanna distrupt this flow of blog posts about Italy. We moved in to Yerucham two days ago, and since then have done…. Not much productive. We shopped 4 times, have soooooo much food, have cooked some pasta

Italy 2010: SORRENTO, NAPLES AND POMPEII

DAY FIVE:

We decided during one of our many pre-italy meetings not to go to Florence and to go to Sorrento instead. Sorrento is this cool coastal town in southeast Italy. We chose Sorrento because Florence was supposedly extremely expensive, and Adam thought Sorrento was going to be really cool. Also, it was on the way to our next destination: Lecce (located on the southern most tip of the boot of Italy).

We boarded a train from Rope at the Termini to Naples. We about a 20 minute layover in Naples, but we used that time to get our Naples pass, good for Naples and Pompeii. It is very similar to the Roma pass. The train took about 45 minutes to get to Pompeii. Once in Pompeii, we stored our bags at the train station and searched for some delicious Pompeian pizza. There were a bunch of pizza stands lined up, and after turning every owner down at least once, one guy told us that he would prove to us why his pizza is the best. He brought me down personally to the kitchen. He showed me how he makes the pizzas fresh and that makes them better. That bought him 7 pizzas from us.

After lunch, tour guide Adam (and Ricky Steves) lead us on a tour through the Pompeii. The tour took two hours. We saw basically a really old city, made completely of rocks, that Pompeians lived in thousands of years ago. I’ll post some pics of that as well. The end of the tour ended at a cool coliseum. There, we took a little ciesta. I was, of course, the first one to get bored, so instead of napping, I ran and jumped onto where the coliseum goes up. everyone else quickly realized what I was doing and wanted to join. Nadav was the first one to get up because he was really tall. Everyone else wondered how I made it up there. I used my “jumping over walls” skills I aquired at gadna to get up and over the wall. I had to teach the others how to do it properly. Eventually, we all made it up. it was pretty cool

We left the ruins and reboarded the train going the same direction as before. Pompeii is almost exactly halfway between Naples and Sorrento.

Once we arrived in Sorrento, we did the usual getting lost for some time before finally realizing where we were going. Eventually, we reached the “deluxe hostel.” Let me tell you, it was probably the nicest hostel in the entire world. it looked like a up-scale hotel, but was the same price as all the other hostels we had stayed at. We had our own rooms. I roomed with Seth, Seffi and Joey. WE had our own shower, beds (no bunkbeds which was nice), free wifi, and a big TV! We walked downstairs to find the hostel also connectied to what seemed like the community pool. We didn’t end up swimming, but we could have if we wanted to.

Gabe, Nadav and I left a little later to hit up the grocery store. I had the great idea to but some Italian cheese and crackers as a snack. What an idea it was. The Italian cheese was so delicious!

After our grocery store run, we went to find dinner. What did we have for dinner you ask? Of course, we had pizza! A bunch of us ended up getting pasta and the pizza place though. I got gnocci, sooooooo good.

After, we went back to the hostel and watched district 9 on Adam’s computer. We went to sleep after it ended, around midnight.

Day SIX:

We slept in a bit the next day, and ended up leaving around 10:40. We took a train at 11 to Naples where we saw the famous archeological museum. It was really cool, but very similar to the Rome national museum.

After, we heard from Rick that the best pizza place in all of Italy is in Naples. Well, we couldn’t pass that up for lunch! As we made our way over to the pizza place, I quickly learned that Naples is dirtyyyyyyyyyyyy, but very alive. It’s a very interesting city. I woudnl want to stay there overnight, so I’m glad we only took a day trip. Rick’s pizza place had a line out the door and onto the street Rick mentioned that in his book as well. He said that the best pizza place in Italy had a “rival pizza store.” We figured the rival had to be good if it was the rival, so we decided to go there. Still fantastic pizza, quite possibly the best pizza on the whole trip. After lunch, I basically had given up hope of going to My. Thesevious, an inactive volcano in Pompeii because no one else really wanted to go as basd as I did or pay for it (it required taxi’s, buses and an entrance fee.) that was really sad. I don’t wanna talk about it. it was already getting dark at that point, so we decided to go back to Sorrento. Before we went to the station, we stopped by the “best hot chocolate in the world,” Illy hot chocolate. It lived up to the hype for sure

Once in Sorrento, we went back to the same place as the previous evening. We were regulars there, basically. I got pasta again, and it was till amazing. We thanked the owner and chef for a second great meal and went to wander around Sorrento. We went through the main square, and this place that seemed like the Sorrento version of the shuk. We ended up at the beach, which was spectacular. It was getting late that this point, but we didn’t want to call it a day yet. We went to a karaoke bar where we sung a ton of The Beatles and Elton John. We expected the karaoke bar to be just some guy sitting with a karaoke machine and hoping the three people the bar will want to sing a song. We were pretty much right. There was a big screen displaying the words for us to read, and whever we stopped singing, he took over. After we were singing without mics for about 10 minutes, he brought one over to us. When he turned on Billy Joel, we all went nuts. He was basically a professional karaokeist. Funny we left around 12:30 and got back to the hostel after.

To Lecce (Florence):

DAY SEVEN:

We woke up at 6, and left the hostel by 7. We were at the strain staion by 7:15. We neded to be at the naples Train staion by 8:50 to catch our triain to Lecce. Every time we had taken the train in the past, it didn’t take more than an hour to get to Naples. We gave ourselves plento of time just in case the train was running a little late.

A little late is an understatement. It was 45 minutes longer than we expected. We got off the train at 8:53, and sprinted through the whole terminal to our train. I think I knocked down at least 3 people during the sprint with my huge ski bag. It was crazy and a little fun, but it ended in failure. We missed our train to Lecce by exactly 3 minutes, even when it left late. We decided to go to Florence instead.