More details: Italy!!

Hey everyone,

Yes, we made it home safe and sound! Now that we are home and have free, unlimited internet, I will try to fill you in on everything we did!

Interlaken, Switzerland:

We went "canyoning". Here are a few of the pictures from the adventure!

Camogli, Italy:

After finally leaving Switzerland, we made it to Italy. The train ride from Interlaken all the way into Italy took all day, and we got into the town of Camogli around 7pm. We wandered from the train station and found our B&B....and we found out that we were actually staying in a woman's apartment! She had at least 2 extra rooms she was using for the "B&B", and it was cool to stay with an Italian family (even if it was a little odd being in someone else's home!). Her English was pretty bad, but her son and husband were around every once in a while and helped us communicate.

Anyway, we were in Italy and on the Mediterranean after all, so we left the room and went for a stroll on the beach and to find some Italian dinner. Apparently it was still Happy Hour, so when we ordered drinks at a bar by the port (waiting for sunset :) we were served all sorts of snacks and food for free along with our drinks! There were olives and cheeses and prosciutto...it was great! We were barely hungry for dinner after that, so we just split a caprese salad (fresh mozzarella, tomatoes and basil/olive oil/balsamic vinegar, so good!) and then went on a mission for gelato after watching the sun sink below the mountains.

We found some awesome gelato on our way back to our little place, and sat on the beach to eat it...but the beaches here are all rock (pretty rounded little grey stones, really pretty, but not comfy), so we headed home when we were done.

The B&B window directly overlooked the train station. That means it was a great location and easy to find, but super loud! We heard the trains go by all night long! Our adorable hostess gave us these tiny earplugs to use (we had also brought our own, a lesson I learned from hostels a long time ago!), but we were afraid to use them and miss our alarm clock.

We got up the next morning and had a cute continental breakfast in her living room before getting ready to go Scuba diving. Let me just say that while "continental" breakfasts are fine sometimes, I really miss American/English breakfasts after a while. So much bread! Its all they eat! But we had bread and cakes and cereal and jams, and got ready for our dive.

We were both a little nervous to go diving with totally different equipment with people who didn't exactly speak the best English, but once we got to the dive store we were put at ease. They had even better gear than what we normally rent! And the water was a bit warmer there, so we didn't have to wear the heavy-duty wetsuits and full gloves that we are used to in San Diego!

The only problem came when the asked us how much weight we needed....we had no idea how to convert our normal weight in pounds to kilograms: we are terrible scientists!! You think we would be used to the metric system, but I realized I'm used to thinking in the metric system, but not converting back and forth! Anyway, we got it all straightened out and went down to the docks to catch our dive boat.

We stuck with the guide the whole time, and the 4 or 5 other Italian divers followed behind us. The first dive was exploring this underwater "mountain." It was a big hill that we spiraled around as we went down. We got to see a ton of cool fish (we don't really have schools of fish where we normally dive here in SD). We saw at least 4 big eels, a few teeny tiny purple slugs, a bunch of red gorgonians (kind of like sea fans), and a bunch of other cool anemonies and stuff. It was beautiful, and the water was so clear and warm!

(PS - I did not take the underwater pictures here, I stole them from the internet...but I took all the others!)

We had a great dive, and in between the first and second dives, they took us to a place where we could swim on the surface and look at a famous dive spots - the "Christ of the Abyss." After jumping back into the water to look at the sunken statue, we snacked on some fococcia bread and motored over to the next dive site. Taylor and I were being pretty quiet since everyone else was speaking Italian - but I heard someone say something about the "Americans" and then everyone else laughed....I asked the guide what they were talking about, and she said they all really wanted to smoke a cigarette between dives, but they were afraid of offending us! Haha.

Anyway, the second dive was along the wall of an underwater canyon. Again there were a ton of cool fish (more eels!) and overall a great dive. The scenery was amazing on the way home - sheer grey rock faces against the beautiful aquamarine colors of the ocean and the bright colored buildings of the village.

We got back to the docks and had another great Italian meal. Tons of cheese and meat :)


Santa Margherita, Italy:

We got cleaned up at the B&B, said goodbye to our cute hostess, and got on what should have been a 6 minute train ride to the next town over. Of COURSE, the train didn't stop and rolled right by the station we wanted. We then got off, bought ANOTHER train ticket back to the correct town, and waited for another train (oooohhhhh Italy...).

After the 1.5 hour-train-ride-that-should-have-taken-6-minutes, we arrived in Santa Margherita. I chose to go there because there was a cool hotel that was actually inside an old castle! It was quite a hike up the hill to get there, but the view from the castle tower was great, and we got to stay in the 3 star hotel for free! (Thanks to some "points" from a credit card :) The town was pretty ritzy and it took us a while to find a place for drinks and appetizers...but since it was Happy Hour again when we ordered drinks we got another huge platter of snacks! We wandered around town looking for an authentic looking gelato place.

It is so much fun to just walk the streets in Europe. The tiny little roads are more like alleys, the sharp corners hide the shops around the road, the colorful shops are so exotic - I love it! We found some cool piazzas and a beautiful church, and walked back up the huge hill to our castle.

Finale Ligure, Italy:

The next day, after yet another continental breakfast (although this one had hard boiled eggs, score!), we took a train to Finale Ligure , another little beach town in Italy. We had a 20 minute schlep to our little hotel, but it was on a great block, and the town was much cooler and more low key than Santa Margherita. We dumped our stuff and got our suits and went to the beach! It was a gorgeous day, and we found a strip of "public" beach. The water was a little cold, but we both went in the water since it was so hot.

It was a relaxing afternoon, and we saved up our appetite for a big Italian meal for our last night in Italy...but since nothing is open before 8pm, we had a German beer right outside our hotel at a German bar (odd, I know). We eventually found a cool ocean side place and had antipasto, penne with pesto, and an amazing pizza! I think it was Taylor's favorite part of the whole trip! Its great having dinner by the sea, and after a leisurely walk home, we of course stopped for our last official Italian gelato. A great end to a relaxing day and a good time in Italy!

That was our last night in Italy...and catch our next exciting episode: FRANCE!!

~Kristyn