Perugia, Pisa & Tivoli!!

This weekend was absolutely packed with activities!  On Friday a bunch of us decided to go to Perugia for the night. Perugia is about 2 hours away from Orvieto by train and is in the same province as we are. Perugia is also where Baci chocolates are made and are famous for their chocolate! I was so excited when I learned that fact and was hoping to see the factory where they make them. We took the train to Perugia and met this woman that told us what discoteca we should go to. Once we got to Perugia the real fun began when we tried to find our hostel. According to the directions it was 15 minutes away by walking but they barely gave any other directions. After getting lost several times and asking several people, we finally found it! It was SO much nicer than the hostel we stayed at in Rome. After we got there, we took the mini metro (it looked like a little pod running on a track) into central Perugia. The city is medium sized and had lots of cute clothing shops and of course, chocolate shops. We walked around a bit and heard some guys speaking English and came to find out they were from Notre Dame University, were studying in Rome and happened to be staying at the same hostel as us. We told them the discoteca we were going to go to and we saw them again later. While walking around, we found a gelato shop where we got crepes with gelato inside and nutella on top. It was amazing! After that we got back on the metro and got ready to go out. We got to the discoteca at like 11pm and they told us that everyone was still eating dinner and the dancing wouldn’t start until about 1am. Luckily they let us inside and some of us made friends with people sitting and eating. The discoteca was really fun and lively but the ones in Rome were much better.

The next day some of us decided we wanted to go to Pisa to see the leaning tower because there aren’t really a lot of other open weekends to do a day trip over there. It took us about 3 or 4 hours to get there between the train time and our layovers. During the layover we experienced having to pay to go to the bathroom, which is a serious rip off! We accidentally were at the wrong platform and had to run over to the correct one that we got just in time. When we got there we got directions and headed to the tower. It was crazy to be walking on the street and seeing the top of the tower getting closer and closer to us. Once we finally got to it I was still in shock that the tower was really there, right in front of me! We all did the stereotypical tourist pictures of us holding up the tower or pushing it over. It was funny because literally everyone was doing the same thing! It doesn’t matter how old or young or what you looked like, you were standing there looking like an idiot before someone finally said “Okay it looks so real!”. After we were done being obnoxious tourists, we found a cute place to get dinner where I got some great pesto gnocchi and then we went by a gelato shop before barely making it onto the train. We finally got home at around midnight. It was exhausting but well worth it!

On Sunday, we went to Tivoli with the school. Tivoli is only a couple of miles away from Rome and is on a hill. They took us to a villa called Villa Adriana that was made by a prime minister named Hadrian. They are mostly ruins but it was cool to look at and plus I got to see my name on like 10 signs so I thought it was really cool. Afterward we went up the hill to the main portion of Tivoli and took a lunch break. While we were walking around at least 5 people walked up to us asking us to come to their restaurant for lunch. It was really weird and creepy but we finally gave in and followed this guy to a nice restaurant that actually had a lot of people in it. After lunch we went to Villa d’Este that was made by a cardinal. The Villa had beautiful gardens and fountains everywhere so we explored those and took a million pictures. Then we went back to meet the bus and saw that a parade was about to start, celebrating Carnival. Luckily our bus was running late because of the parade traffic and we got to watch a good portion of it. Kids dressed up in costumes like it was Halloween and the floats looked like they were made with some sort of paper mache (However you spell that) with adults and kids on them throwing confetti everywhere. It was quite the sight and made Anna and I even more excited for Carnival in Venice! Only 2 more weeks and we’ll be there!