Spring Break, part 1

Spring break was incredible. I can’t believe how much of Europe we saw in two weeks and how much time I spent on trains! It would take me forever to recap everything, so I’ll try my best to summarize.

Kelsey and I started in the south of France, Nice mostly and one day in Cannes. It was really beautiful and sunny, but it’s an obvious “beach town” atmosphere and I think Kelsey enjoyed lounging around on the shore a little more than I did. But there was a really great modern art museum in Nice with works by Warhol, Lichtenstein, Rauschenberg and Yves Klein. The annual Nice artisan expo was also going on that weekend so we went to it and there were a lot of interesting food and craft vendors.

The beautiful Mediterranean sea in Nice

From Nice we took the train to Florence, Italy, where we met up with Jennifer. Here I had my first hostel experience (we had a budget hotel in Nice). It was actually better than I had expected. We were in a nine-girl room with a bath inside. It was a really popular hostel, and the very first night we met a group of people in the lobby that invited us to go out with them. Most of the people were college grads who were taking several months off to travel. They thought we were crazy to be doing all our traveling in two weeks. But for me I would much rather spend a long time in one place, like I am in Paris, and really get to know it, than to be constantly traveling to lots of different places. These past two weeks were exhausting enough for me; I can’t imagine traveling for 5 months!

It seemed like most of Florence was spent waiting in a lot of lines: 3 hours to get into the Uffizi gallery (where all the famous Renaissance paintings are held) and 4.5 hours (!!!) to get into the Academia to see Michelangelo’s David. I guess when you go to Italy you have to see these things, but never have I ever waited that long for anything in my life!

Florence, on top of the Duomo

Of course we ate really well in Florence: Italian wine, cheese, bread, pizza, gelato… all sinfully wonderful. One thing Italian does better than France (in my opinion) is cheese. I don’t really like the soft, stinky French cheeses but I LOVE all Italian cheeses.

After three nights in Florence we went to Venice for the day. A guy from Australia named Matt who we had met at the hostel in Florence was also going to Venice so we all took the same train. We basically just spent the day wandering around the canals, getting lost and finding ourselves again. Venice is so surreal, very fairytale-like. We kept saying how the canals and gondolas looked like Disneyland rides. It was definitely a tourist-dominated city though so we were all fine with only spending one day there.

Quintessential Venetian gondolas in the Canal San Marco

That night we took a sleeper train from Venice to Vienna, Austria. I was so surprised at how nice the train was! We had our own private 3-person compartment, and the beds were actually really comfortable (at least in comparison to our hostel beds) and I didn’t have a hard time sleeping. We even got breakfast of coffee and Viennese bread in the morning!

Ok well I’ll save the second half of trip for the next entry…