Cinque Terre

After spending the first weekend in Florence settling in, I went to Cinque Terre with my housemates and Chris, Stuti, Matt, Cam and Fi. Cinque Terre are 5 small villages built into the cliffs along the Ligurian coastline which are part of a national park that is a World Heritage site. There are a number of walking trails between the villages and we spent the sights and sun-backing on a pebble beachweekend wandering from town to town enjoying the. These villiages were very cute, nestled into the coastline. They all had a relaxed atmosphere, although each had it’s own character. The train journey home was somewhat interesting, as the train was half an hour late and packed full of people. We ended up having to stand for about half an hour on the first train before we were able to get seats… and then when we changed in Pisa, we again had to stand for another half an hour or so.

The first day at uni provided a couple of challenges, being our first attempt at train travel in Italy. My housemates and I ventured down to the station in the morning, having found out the train times the day before and ventured to buy tickets from the ticket machine. At this time, we discovered that in fact, none of us knew which train was the right one, so we picked a train based on the departure times. Fortunately it was the right one!!! On the Train we met this American called Nick, who taught English at a kindergarten in Prato. He explained the system of validating tickets, which of course we hadn’t done because we didn’t know where or how… We found the uni fairly easily and started classes in Italy. Classes were quite strange at first, with classes of about 10 to 15, but they are very enjoyable. We discovered a number of cute little cafes around uni with varying quality of coffee and cakes, finally deciding on Nuovo Mundo as our coffee place... It has the most amazing assortment of pastries and small cakes!!!