Sorry again for the lack of updates. See, what happened was I went on spring break and when I came back to Florence, my mom showed up for a ten day visit. On second thought, that's approximately half of my readership right there who were staying in Florence, so I guess not too many people missed the updates.
Anyway, I've done a lot of stuff in the last few weeks, and not only would you all get bored reading it, I don't particularly feel like writing it. So I decided that what I'll do instead is give a brief summary of everything, followed by something like a photo-guided tour, where I'm your tour guide, the pictures are the exhibits, and the Internet is the museum. That was a pretty good metaphor I just came up with on the fly like that. Everyone with me? Okay.
First, as promised, the summary. I spent spring break traveling between Alicante, Spain; Galway, Ireland; and Paris, France with my lovely girlfriend Brianna, who was kind enough to plan the entire thing in extremely economical fashion. We were in Spain for the most amount of time, buzzed up to Ireland to see our friends Nic and Natalie from school, and then stayed over in Paris on our way back to Florence. Sure, there were lots of mini-adventures in the meantime, but that's the gist of it. My mom got to Florence a few days later. We spent most of the time cruising around the city seeing stuff, but for the last few days we headed north to Cinque Terre, which has to have been one of my favorite trips of the entire semester so far. Since I was in school all week, mamma spent a lot of time on her own, doing cool things like seeing museums, ordering coffee, wandering the streets, etc. But this is not a blog about my mom, it is a blog about ME. And I should never forget that. Thus, onward to the photos:
The view from our hotel room in Alicante. It was a really fancy hotel, four stars or something like that, that Brianna found for dirt cheap somehow. We only stayed there for a night though. Off to the right you can sort of see an old castle on the top of the hill.
On the beach in Alicante.
We found Nic in Ireland.
He and Natalie took us out to an Irish lunch. It was weird having everyone speaking English.
Then we walked out into the countryside, arriving at this old castle on the bank of the river.
Sitting on the edge of said river.
Back in Italy, I took mom to a Fiorentina game her first full day here. She sang all the songs and chanted all the chants. Good mommy.
Then we headed to Cinque Terre.
This is pretty much what it looked like. Tiny streets, colorful houses, dramatic landscape. Plus the people were generally very friendly, much more so than in Florence.
This is a shot from the little bulkhead where we ate lunch.
I got my first Italian haircut in Cinque Terre. Funny story - the barber I went to didn't speak any English, but I noticed he had a Fiorentina scarf/poster combo up above the mirror . So naturally, we started talking about Fiorentina (who he loves), and when he found out I'm from Florence, he called his buddy in from outside. He poured three mugs of beer, and after toasting to Fiorentina we all pounded them. Mind you, this was before he even started cutting my hair.
A shot of me and Brianna
The only of the five villages that's not right on the sea, Corniglia is still quite beautiful.
We were lucky to be able to see the sunset. I tried to take a cool picture, but it obviously didn't turn out very well. Hopefully you can get the idea that it was very nice to look at.And that should hopefully bring you all more or less up to speed on everything I've been up to lately. Mom, sorry for all that stuff I said earlier about not wanting to write any more about you. I didn't mean it, and it was really great having you here.
