Hello friends!
Look at me, actually doing what I said I would! It’s time to fill you in on what I did last week for 10 days on spring break.
Well, before we start, I might as well mention that right before spring break (during midterms, actually), I caught a nasty bronchitis. So, like the nice friend he is, Italy Nick brought me to the doctor after our psych midterm because I had no idea where to go. The doctor basically told me I had bronchitis, and prescribed some antibiotics to get rid of the crap in my chest before it turned to pneumonia and gave me some codeine to sleep. I felt better in a few days, so God bless doctors and modern medicine.
And now, I present to you: Spring Break 2015
LISBON
Saturday the 28th, about 12 of us headed to the Pisa airport to begin our spring break in Lisbon, Portugal, before some of us kind of split off to do our own things. Luckily, that Saturday was the first day in probably 4 days that I actually kind of felt like myself again after staying in bed for the entirety of Friday.
Ryanair (the extremely low cost airline in europe that we take many places, our flight to Lisbon was 30 euro for example) doesn’t fly out of Florence, but lucky for us (maybe not so lucky for me) a bus company offers a 5 euro bus from the Santa Maria Novella train station in the heart of Florence, to the Pisa airport! I say not so lucky for me, because if you are reading this and have known me since childhood, you know that my parents used to call me the “throw-up kid”. I have pretty much thrown up on everyone in my immediate family during some family road trip. Obviously, I’ve mostly grown out of that over the years, I VERY rarely get car sick anymore, and planes have never been a problem, but depending on how hot the bus is or what I’ve had to eat that day, buses can still be a big issue for my tummy. This was a particularly warm bus ride, and I spent about 95% of it with most of my body in the aisle, staring intently out the windshield. Then we got on the airplane, and (thank you budget airlines) had a really rocky take off and many “dips” that made my stomach turn as we were climbing to cruising altitude.
But at last, we made it to Lisbon.
And cabs were DIRT CHEAP. So we got to our hostel without a hitch. Our hostel was freaking awesome. It was called YES! hostel, and they gave us welcome shots upon arrival, and told us about the 4 course family-style dinner with open bar that’s 10 euro at night, as well as a pub crawl that’s 10 euro after dinner. Can you say awesome?
After checking in, we headed to a medieval castle at the top of the city. This was the view we arrived at:
Pretty spectacular, huh?
We explored the castle for a long time, climbing it’s many towers and looking out at different parts of the city. Then, we headed back down into the city to do a little more exploring.
Lisbon was honestly so cool. I had a bit of a mental list of places I wanted to go while studying abroad, and Lisbon wasn’t on it, but I’m SO glad I went. It had such a San Francisco feel with the trolley cars, hills, pastel colors, and even it’s own Golden Gate bridge over their bay built by the same architecht as the one in SF! Also worth noting, it seemed like some part of every building was covered in beautiful ceramic tile, and Portuguese people are so beautiful with their dark hair and green/blue eyes.
We found a little street fair on the way back to the hostel, and stopped to try their sangria and many forms of bacon and sausage. We also found a pastry stand with Portugal’s famous pastel de nata (see below, its a buttery, flaky pastry crust with cream inside that’s torched on the top) for 1 euro and a delicious taco-like meat filled pastry.
We went on to get many more of these pastries in our next day and a half in Portugal.
We had an amazing family style 4 course dinner cooked by the chef at the hostel that night, and went on a pub crawl with a lot of different people from around the world.
The next day, we spent most of the day at a beautiful monastery near the bay (see photo below of Katie and I in the open air top floor), and then just walked around the street fair again. That night, we found an amazing “Fogo de Chao”-esque buffet restaurant for 7 euro all you can eat. Lots of traditional Portuguese food as well as meat sliced onto your plate from swords.
Monday afternoon, we headed to Madrid.
MADRID
We got to our hostel, and my friend from highschool Lucia, who’s studying in Madrid this semester, met up with us before dinner.
Carly had found a restaurant with really good Paella and made reservations for (all 14 of) us there. When we arrived though, they said they only had 7 plates of paella because it takes so long to make, so we all shared a plate but that was MORE than enough.
After filling our bellies with paella and many jugs (as seen on the table) of sangria, we headed to a local discotech to experience some fun Madrid nightlife.
We spent the next few days touring museums, going to markets, and finding palaces in Madrid. We even saw Owen Wilson at the Prado museum! It was a strange encounter, Lucia, Nick and I were in one of the rooms by ourselves looking at paintings, and he comes in just bopping around (I say bopping because the way he walks is kinda goofy). Nick and I looked at eachother like …..that’s Owen Wilson, right?! And after hearing him talk to his friend there was no doubt about it. When we walked up with our phones out to ask if we could get a picture, his “friend” (probably bodyguard) just said no photos, and they left the room. So weird. I just saw that he walked the runway in Zoolander apparel at Paris fashion week so maybe he just wanted to make a stop in Madrid.
I really liked a lot of the touristy things we did, especially the big, central park-like gardens in the middle of the city.
Here’s a photo of the crystal palace they built for a world’s fair in Madrid’s largest park:
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We met up with Katie’s best friend (who I also know because he was friends with some of my friends from highschool), Reed, and we all spent the next few days eating our way through Madrid basically. There was a place called el tigre that, for 6 euro, gave you a mojito the size of your head and unlimited tapas of potatos bravas, croquettas, manchego with bread, garlic chicken wings, and spanish tortilla (like a quiche). Lucia took us to Taco Bell where (amongst many Spanish people, I might add) we got a taco and a beer for 1 euro. We also went to a place by Reed’s school that had a “Menu del Dia” which gave you a 3 course meal for 9 euro and the old Spanish lady serving us was hilariously cute.
My final night in Madrid, our friends had already left to go to Barcelona, I was leaving the next morning for Nice in the south of France to meet up with some of my other girl friends from the program, and Katie was staying an extra day with Reed before meeting up with Kenzie in Marseille. We decided to go to a grocery store and cook some food at Reed’s because we’d been eating out so much. But right after I checked out with my groceries, I realized my iphone 6 had been stolen out of my front jacket pocket. SUPER BUMMER. That really sucked, and obviously I was really upset, but here I am! Healthy and living with no iphone. Honestly, if my phone was going to get stolen at anytime, it happened at the perfect time because this Monday is the beginning of the U of M’s spring break, and many people, including Katie D, have people coming to visit. So my parents gave Katie’s friend a new iphone for me (thanks again, mom and dad), and it should be in my hands Monday afternoon. But that did mean that I lost a lot of photos. Luckily, my phone had automatically backed up during our first night in Lisbon, but any photos after that are stolen from other people I was with.
NICE:
Travelling from Madrid to Nice on my own was my first solo travel experience in Europe and I must say, for a girl with no iphone to keep her busy on and between flights, I did just fine. I had to fly through Brussels (I know, geographically it makes no sense but it was the cheapest), so I decided to do a little experiment. Since I was coming from Spain and headed to France, and people in Belgium typically either speak French, Dutch, German or English, I wanted to see what people would speak to me in if I didn’t open my mouth first. Everyone always says that Europeans “just know” when someone’s American, so I wanted to test that out. And almost everyone in Brussels started out speaking to me in…..drum roll please…..FRENCH. So weird. I didn’t think I looked French but maybe somehow I do.
Anyway, so I got to Nice (pronounced nees) and immediately fell in love with the French Riviera. The water is incredibly blue, the people were really nice (no pun intended) and super helpful. I got myself a banana nutella crepe on my way to a bus, and met my girl friends for some mimosas on a beautiful peninsula north of the city.
We spent the following days finding beautiful beaches and soaking in some vitamin D. I had french onion soup (which I had forgotten to get in Paris), more camembert cheese, and salt and vinegar chips (missed those).
Some photos from the beautiful beaches we were hanging out on:
That Saturday morning, the girls who I was in Nice with headed back to Florence, and I got on a train to spend the rest of the weekend in Marseille with Katie, Kenzie, and Kenzie’s family friend Melissa who lives in Marseille.
MARSEILLE
On the train, I ended up sitting next to this adorable 17 year old French girl who was fascinated with the United States. We chatted almost the whole time, and had to use google translate on her phone a lot because her English wasn’t perfect and my French is non-existent. It was so fun to talk to her, and it ended up being really helpful because I apparently was in the wrong train car, and she was able to talk (in French for me) to the man who’s seat I was in and he happily sat down somewhere else in the mostly empty car.
When I got there, they picked me up at the train station, we dropped my stuff off at Melissa’s apartment (which she GAVE US for the weekend and her and her boyfriend stayed at his parents house, she’s absurdly nice), went to a bakery to get a croque monsieur and a citron tarte, and headed to the calanques for a hike with a view.
Sweaty from our awesome hike, Melissa dropped us back off at her apartment, we grabbed the bottle of champagne she gave us, and went to this lookout nearby to watched the sunset:
(The island there is the prison that the book the Count of Monte Cristo is based off of)
Then, we walked to the grocery store and made ourselves a 4 course meal of homemade guacamole and chips, camembert and a baguette, chicken with French herb seasonings that Katie had bought from a market earlier, and triple chocolate ice cream for dessert. Bellies full, we laughed until we fell asleep, as usual with Katie and Kenzie.
The following day, we started the morning off right with “Pain au Chocolat” aka big, round, chocolate croissants (except not croissants I learned because they’re not crescent shaped) and then headed down into the city near the port.
We walked around in the sun for a long time, and had the (apparently traditional) southern french meal of muscles and fries.
Here’s a cool photo of one of the ports that Katie took:
Later that afternoon before Melissa took Katie and me to the airport, she took us all to the Notre Dame de la Garde church at the top of the hill overlooking Marseille. That was absolutely gorgeous, and although the church was small relative to the Italian churches in smaller cities that I’ve been in, the views were spectacular.
So, she dropped us off at the airport, and we got on our plane that was heading to Rome. Our flight got into Rome from Marseille at about 9:30, and the last train to Florence left from Rome at 9. We took a bus and a metro train to the train station where we could catch a 6 am train, and planned on just being in the train station until then. We found a quiet, warm spot in a corner near some food places that were closed, and made a little homeless corner with our towels and clothes that we had in our bags. Just as we got comfortable around 1:30 am, a security guard walked by and when he saw us, started screaming at us in Italian, saying what are you doing here, you can’t be here, etc. We told him that we were just waiting for our train that was coming at 6 am and he told us that the train station was closed from 1am-5am.
He sternly escorted us out of the train station, having to unlock doors because he had essentially already locked us in. Unfortunately for us, this train station was not directly in the city, and the only hotels were like a 10 minute drive. So, we walked over to the 2 cab drivers sitting outside of the station and tried to explain to them in Italian our situation. One of them called his friend who was a concierge at a hotel, and they brought us there. We ended up having to each pay 25 euro to stay in this hotel room for literally 3 and a half hours because we arrived at 2 and had to leave to catch our train at 5:30. It was even the same taxi driver who brought us there that picked us up in the morning when the concierge ordered us a taxi.
Eventually of course, we made it back to Florence, but lesson learned: do research like what time train stations close, ahead of time if you think you’re just going to sleep there.
Overall, it was a really great week. There were obviously a few bumps in the road, but that’s bound to happen when travelling in so many foreign countries. I’m truly lucky to have had the opportunity to go to 3 different countries and 4 different cities last week, and I wouldn’t trade a single memory to have had the entire thing go smoothly.
We talked this week in my psych class about how spring break is always a good measure for study abroad students to see how much the city they’re studying in feels like home to them when they get back from a 10 day vacation. I can tell you that Florence and my apartment here definitely feels like another home to me. The fact that I don’t really have to use maps anymore, I generally recognize where I am most of the time, I’m starting to understand the social norms and Italian etiquette, and I can somewhat communicate in the native language has made it a relief to be back in Florence after 10 days away.
I love this country and this city so much. I’m positive Florence will always hold a special place in my heart.
Things I’m looking forward to very soon include:
– A vespa tour through chianti vinyards, and a chianti wine tasting/olive oil tasting tomorrow!
– Showing my Florentine pride at my first Fiorentina soccer game against Milan on Monday!
– Going to Morocco on Thursday with a couple friends to ride camels and camp in the Sahara desert!
Anyway, if you made it through this ungodly long post, I applaud you. Thanks for reading.
This has been another edition of “Katie’s Ramblings About her European Adventures”.
Tutto va bene. Ciao for now!
-Katie
Firenze e Roma 