Where ARE we???

I forgot to mention in my last post about Italy that I really love Italians. They are just like the movies! They all have that fun accent and we even heard a man say "Mammamia!" They are just great. And everyone calls the girls "bella" - "Pizza for you bella! Ciao bella! Grazi bella!" Every girl is "bella" - I like that habit of telling a girl when she is beautiful. Italians got it right. And they never say it in a degrading way or in a threatening way - they genuinely just want you to know that they think you are "bella!" They were also so helpful - we had so many people as soon as we got there who were asking where we were trying to go and giving us directions (we were all pretty suspicious at first, looking around to see if they had friends who were robbing us while they pretended to be nice...but they were all just genuinely helpful!) So I love Italians.

Ok I promised I would finish my Italy story, so here it is.
Kara, Daley and I got up early, left Tavarnelle and took a train from Florence to Carrara train station. I had always heard that the main station in Cinque Terre was La Spezia, but I just assumed that there must be another station there (never assume anything). So we met up with the other groups at Carrara who had been there for a while, but had not been able to find out anything about how to get to our hostel. The map we had said that buses ran near our hostel, but we couldn't figure out where to take a bus to since our map only covered the 3 blocks around our hostel. We walked a little ways and then asked a friendly bus driver (he should know, right?) and he told us that we were too close to ride a bus, all we had to do was cross the roundabout by the supermarket and then we'd be in the village...so we kept walking. We walked for about 20 more minutes and nothing was looking familiar at all, so we started trying to find someone to ask. Finally, a man named Paolo who appeared to be delivering mail, was able to tell us where we needed to go...and that we were very far away from it. So, being the nice Italian man he was, he offered us a ride! There were 8 of us, and he had a very small car, so he had to make 2 trips (don't worry, mom, the guys split up so the girls weren't alone). Paolo started driving and driving, and then pointed at a sign that indicated we were entering a diffferent county....and we kept driving. All the while, we were trying to stay positive and just hope that Paolo actually knew where he was taking us - he was our only hope. We started driving up the mountain and we were getting further and further from any civilization, and we stopped. We were in the middle of nowhere, no idea what city we had ended up in (only Paolo knew and his English was...well...he tried.) So Paolo left to go get through the other group (I'm sure they thought Paolo had killed us and was never coming back - it was a long ride) and we made our way up to check out the "bungalows" we had rented. The place had been advertised as having a swimming pool, a restaurant and fully furnished kitchens, and was also used for weddings. well, maybe in 1984. Our bungalows weren't bad, but the pool was greenish brown, the restaurant was "out of season" according to the owner (he laughed at us and wanted to know where we get food - that was our first sign that things weren't going to be like we planned). There were no grocery stores or anywhere to buy food for miles. We were stuck.
The place was beautiful - I'll give it that. We were up in the mountains surrounded by trees, with a great view of the town below (civilization was just out of our reach) and we could even see the ocean...we just couldn't get to it. We spent a while wallowing in our hunger (I hadn't eaten anything that day) and then we just started laughing uncontrollably because it all seemed like a joke or a weird dream. But it was real. Very real. The other group finally got there and we explained what was going on. We managed to get the owner to agree to take one of us to the store to buy food, so we sent Grant with all the cash we could come up with (there are no ATMs in the middle of nowhere...) and a list of cheap food (pasta!) Then we went out to lay on the (out of season) restaurant patio and just enjoyed the sunshine for a while and tried to ignore our hunger. It was awesome to be able to lay outside and be really warm and actually get a little bit tan (i have a great tan line from my leggings...)
Grant finally made it back so we went to check out what he got - we had just enough pasta and sandwich stuff for 3 meals (we could sleep through one of them) so we were encouraged. We had spaghetti for dinner and then went to bed early (SO nice to sleep).
The next morning, we woke up to rain. It rained all day. Our great plans of laying out in the sun were changed to sitting inside. I read all of Harry Potter 6, took lots of great naps with the rain (my favorite) and we had lots of time to get to know each other. Us girls played various games including the "Ha!" game where you lay on each others' stomachs and say "Ha" in a circle until everyone starts laughing...we had nothing better to do! Jessalyn also taught us how to sound ridiculous while laughing. She's a pro. We had our sandwiches for brunch and then we ate the rest of the spaghetti that afternoon - Kara and Daley had gone on a walk the night before and found a great pizzeria not too far away, so we decided we could do that for dinner the second night...so we ate all of our food. Bad plan. We're just dumb college kids, but we should have known that if we ate all our food with plans to go to a restaurant, the restaurant would naturally be closed that night. It was Monday. Who closes on a Monday night? I don't know. But we were hungry (again) and had no food (again). So the boys decided to be heroic and they went into emergency-mode and went to look for food. The girls didn't even try to interfere - they needed to feel important, so we stayed home and told stupid stories from our lives. It was great bonding! About an hour and a half later, the boys returned with all the food they could find - one loaf of bread, one small bag of pasta, and one big chunk of cheese. They made us a delicious dinner, but I've never felt so much like an orphan in my life. All 8 of us sat in one bed and ate our handful of pasta, slice of fresh bread and chunk of cheese. We looked pitiful, but that was the best bread and cheese I've ever had!
The next morning we got up super early, praying that our taxis would actually show up on time (we asked the owner to order 2 taxis for 6:45am, but we had no real way of knowing if he really understood). At about 6:47 we were all silently nervous, standing in the rain, but they showed up! So we loaded into our taxis and went to the train station, where our train ended up being about 30 minutes late. We had a gorgeous train ride, right on the coast all the way to Genova/Genoa. We got to the Genoa train station and then had to wait about an hour for a bus to the airport, but we got some real food and it was awesome! We finally caught the bus to the airport and checked in, and once we all had our boarding passes, we could breathe again! It felt so good to know where we were going and to know where we were! Our plane ended up being delayed about 45 minutes (to go along with everything else that day!) but we made it to London and I've never been so glad to be at Stansted. Our bus was (of course) an hour late, so we didn't get back to Oxford til 9:30pm, at which point we had been travelling for about 15 hours! We were exhausted from a long, fun week, and we were SO glad to be home in Oxford!