Rome & Cinque Terra with Mom and Dad

Sunday, October 5th

I am sooo far behind on my blogging, so hopefully I can get caught up on the last two weekends right now!
Starting with last weekend: Mom and Dad flew into Rome on Thursday night (the 25th) so I took the train after class. It was an eventful train ride to say the least, I paid for the fast train, but for some reason there was a problem on the tracks. So it was an hour and twenty minutes longer than it was supposed to be and I was sitting across from a slightly creepy Venezuelan man. We kept speaking Spanish to each other though so at least I got to work on that.
The good news is that my train finally made it to the station and mom and dad were waiting for me when I got off. Yay! It was so good to see them and I was sooo happy. We headed straight to our hotel because we were wiped out and crawled in. The next day we took a bus to the Vatican. It was absolutely huge and definitely gorgeous. We took the stairs to the top of the Vatican to look out over the city and went down into the tombs as well. After that we took a bus to the Parthenon and the Colosseum. The Colosseum was giant and completely mind boggling! After sight seeing mom and I decided to shop…dad didn’t exactly seem to enjoy this part of Rome...but it didn’t last that long because we headed back to the Trevi Fountain. That seemed to be the popular place. It was all lit up and there were tons of people there every night. On our way back to the hotel we ran across the cutest local restaurant called Ristorante da Giovanni. The food was really good and the waiters were sweet little old men, our waiter even put my red rose in a wine bottle and set it on the table.
The next morning we took a train to Florence!!! I couldn’t wait for mom and dad to see the city I’ve been living in and my little home! So we spent the day running around to the Duomo, Ponte Vecchio, seeing the outside of the Uffizzi, doing a little shopping, and mom and dad bought dinner for me and all the roomies. So we ate together down in their hotel room. And by the end of the night we were exhausted, as usual haha so we put in 27 Dresses, skyped with Trev, and then called it a night. Sunday morning mom, dad, 4 of the roomies and I went to Cinque Terra. We went through a tour group called Florence For Fun. The guides were hilarious and made the trip even more fun. We took a train up to Cinque Terra which are 5 villages on the Mediterranean Coast and from there started hiking. The 5 towns are: Riomaggiore, Manarola, Corniglia, Vernazza, & Monterosso. The hikes progressively got more difficult, so we hiked the first 4 and took a ferry to the 5th town. All of Cinque Terra had stunning views with colorful towns settled right on the cliffs overlooking the sea. Oh and most importantly in the last town we had amazing gelato…of course haha! Cinque Terra was on my list of top things to do in Italy and I’m sooo happy I got to see it I’ve got to finish some Italian homework..im supposed to be writing about my hometown haha. So I will write about this last weekend in Milan and Lake Como later!
Ciao Ciao