Day 11 – 13: Cinque Terra and Pisa

Again, sorry for the delay in blogging. It’s getting busier by the day around here and I’m finding it harder and harder to actually sit down and write these things.

This past weekend, Friday the 8th through Sunday the 10th, our little group of 8 people (Me, Mark, Matt, Brandon, Melissa, Christina, Teresa, and Brandy) went to Cinque Terra, a coastal area which means Five Towns. We booked our hostel online a week before, so we were good to go.

It took around 3 or 4 hours to actually get to the place, partly because we had to change trains so much, and partly because I was the only one that would actually take charge and go anywhere. Brandon, our TA and former student, kept getting us completely lost and confused, so I took over his job. You would think that somebody who has already done all this before would have some clue at to what he was doing, but no. I remembered doing all this stuff in England, so it was a piece of cake. Getting 4 girls to be somewhere at a certain time though, was a much harder task.

We arrived in Riomaggiore, one of the five towns, around lunch on Friday and we made our way to the hostel, which was up a big hill, of course. The girls had their own room and the guys had theirs, except ours was more expensive because there was an extra bed, but more on that exciting story later.

After dropping all our junk in the rooms, we headed down to the beach and messed around down there for a while. It was getting quite cloudy, so it wasn’t as warm as normal, and the water was absolutely freezing, so I didn’t stay in too long. And I didn’t want to blind everyone on the beach with my awesome British tan. The beach was pretty rocky, so I explored around there, which was lots of fun. I climbed some rocks and nearly broke every bone from the hip down. Sweeet.

Once the girls finally gave up trying to tan in the cloudy weather, we headed back to the hostel so we could get changed and go out to eat our one fancy meal of the weekend. And what a meal it was. We had to wait for about 20 minutes to get a table for 8, but it was well worth it. Brandon picked a white wine, which was really good, and we all ordered our respective meals from a menu stocked with seafood and pasta, all of which sounded good, but some were really expensive. I settled on a “sampler” meal which had prawn, shrimp, sea bass, and swordfish and it was the most delicious thing I’ve ever had. I didn’t want to stop eating, but I didn’t want to finish because there wouldn’t be any more to eat. Quite the dilemma. Anyway, we ended up spending lots of money on the meal, but everyone was happy by the end of it. We went to a “bar” up the hill a bit and had a drink, just to finish off the evening.

We headed back and that’s when the fun started. The girls got to their room, and all the guys headed up to our room, only to find it open and occupied by a very Welsh girl. Apparently that’s what the 5th bed was for. So the owner thought it would be brilliant to stick one poor little girl in with 4 smelly guys for a night. Thankfully we are all nice guys and treated her like the lady she was, but just imagine if she was in there with 4 idiots. Not a nice night I would imagine.

Anyway, we left early the next morning, just the guys, and hiked over to Manarola, the town over from Riomaggiore. It was supposed to be a 30 minute walk, but took us 45 thanks to the throngs of old people clogging up the road and generally annoying everyone under the age of 30. Little ladies were clinging to the railing as if that wooden stick was the savior of all things. Old men would take 10 minutes to line up one picture in a camera older than dirt. Tour groups were the worst though. You could always spot them because at the front, there would be a foreign-looking person in the front, very often in “chic” modern European dress (or at least they think it’s modern) holding up a very brightly colored umbrella or stick of some color. If you ran into those it only meant trouble.

We reached Manarola finally and walked around its one main street for about 30 minutes, dilapidating its fun things to do quite quickly. We were all getting a bit hungry, so we headed back along the trail to the hostel and the girls. Apparently they’d been up since before we left, but I’m still a bit dubious about that one. Anyway, we headed out and got a quick lunch, then headed to the train station and got a train over to Montarosso, the big city of the 5, or at least the most popular. We got there and sat on a 3 foot strip of rocky sand by the beach for a few hours, going in the water and generally trying to hide the fact that every single person on the beach was tanner than we were. Oh well, I have more important things to do with my life than burn and get cancer, thank you very much.

After the beach we split up into guy and girl groups, with the girls going shopping and the guys going on a ridiculous hike that nearly killed me. How does an hour and a half of uphill climbing on a rocky path while carrying a 20 pound backpack sound? Glorious!

It was great to get to the top though; it made me feel like I’d accomplished something heroic and snapped my pictures to prove it. There actually was a fancy little church at the very top of the mountain, but it was more about the experience than the finish line. I enjoyed it.

Met up with the girls later, and went to eat a quick and cheap meal, which was good. Then we went home again and found that our Welsh roommate had been replaced by an enormously scary Canadian fella that looked like he could rip a tree in half with his right hand. His clothes got stuck in the washing machine in the room, so he promptly pulled out a very large set of very large knives and promptly tried to open it himself. Mark slept downstairs on the girls’ couch.

The next day we left and got on the train home, with a slight detour in Pisa, which was slightly overrated. Yes, it’s leaning. But that’s about it. Canadian fella told me that it was about a 10 minute walk from the station in Pisa, but it was closer to 40. We somehow ran into some fellow Aggies on the train, so they came with us to see the tower too. Brandon was in front, leading us to the tower, but from past experience it has come to my attention that Brandon couldn’t navigate himself out of a paper bag. So I was shouting directions to him from back in the crowd until I could get up there myself, where I took over and led everyone to the leaning marvel.

That was just about our weekend. It was great fun, but I’m looking forward to doing some more architectural trips, maybe going by myself one weekend somewhere.