FB: Genoa

FALL BREAK part one:

As most of you all know Whitney and I spent all last week (10 days in all) travelling Italy. We started our trip in Genoa then went to Florence and from there travelled to Rome. So in this post I will tell about the beginning of our adventures in Genoa.

http://www.clemson.edu/caah/offcam/image/genoa/genoa.jpg

Genoa is a wonderful city. However, our beginnings there were pretty awful. We began our Friday morning around 3 o’clock. I suppose that it really began the night before where we stayed up packing and talking with Kamani and her friend that had just arrived in town until 12:30.

Anyway, Whit woke up at 3am to take a shower. I was disinclined to do the same so I rolled over to sleep for a little longer only to be woken to a “Maike! We have ten minutes!” loudly whispered in my direction. All I could think of was “crap, if we have to run to the freaking plane again I am going to cry!”

We got out the door and down to the bus stop in just enough time to get on our bus at 4:15am [the tube station isn’t opened that early otherwise we would have done that, it’s much faster]. When we get on the bus though, this guy behind us starts talking all sorts of nonsense and totally freaks me out. He’s talking about how his wife died in 1996; at this point I’m like, “okay, fine, so he’s just recollecting bad times and he’s a little mentally messed up, whatever”. But then he starts talking about how he killed her! Including horrible details that left me and my imagination to wander; Freak me out!!! All I could do was sit and pray and think “Dear Jesus, please do not let him follow us and get on the next bus we have to catch”. Luckily God heard my prayers and he got off the next bus stop still talking. But what a way to start our vacation!

After that we got on our train and made it to the airport and everything successfully [after we had to get on another bus to the actual airport because of a gas leak or something]. The flight was wonderful, Whit and I both fell asleep before we took off and only woke up when a baby started crying. Landing in Genoa was wonderful! You could see land on one side of you and the crashing water against the black rocks on the other side, it was beautiful. After landing though, we had some difficulty getting to the “bed and breakfast”.

By a bit of difficulty, I mean that we got off the plane at 10:30am and it was only supposed to take us and hour and a half to get to the place, but with the Italian bus system and not knowing quite how to figure it out it ended up taking us until 4pm to find it.

We actually slept in a woman’s house [yup, surprised us too!]. It turned out to be the best place we stayed during our entire trip, but it wasn’t exactly what we expected. It was located about 45min [in the bus] from the city centre, but within a short walk you could see crashing waves on black rocks…beautiful.

In Genoa, we shopped, visited San Leonardo [a basilica style church with frescos and sculptures], ate great sandwiches, took a 45-min boat tour, and found out that Genoa was the birthplace of Christopher Columbus and was also home of the famous Italian Yacht Club founded in 1879. We ate gelato, mailed some postcards, took a train-like-tram thing to the top of a hill [great view], and ate at McDonalds [smile:]; which is the place to go if you are in your 20’s [there are no old people there at all!].

And that was Genoa. We hopped on a train on Sunday morning to Florence.

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*maike rinaye*