Day 8: Genoa

The French coast line from the train.  It has to be the best train ride in Europe!

We made it to Italy!  We woke up at 7am to catch our train out of Nice and reached the boarder (Ventigmiglia) after about 45 minutes.  From there we transferred to another train taking us to Genoa (Italy--they call it Genova so it can get pretty confusing!) where we stopped to walk around for a few hours and have some pizza for lunch.  I think we were anticipating the town being like Nice or Monaco but it ended up being a very industrial port city although it still had some really nice churches, museums (which we didn't care to pay for), markets, and architecture lining the narrow street ways just off the port.  The port was mostly filled with cruise ships and construction cranes.  After only a few hours there we decided to leave for Florence so we caught a train and two transfers later we were in Florence!  We made it in time to find our hostel in day light.  It's our first time since this trip has started that we'll be sharing our room but we've made friends with a nice Canadian girl named Marae.  She's doing a program where she helps out on farms (http://www.wwoof.org/).  She showed me and Brendan around Florence at night and we had some delicious gelato!  I love gelato...

We were worried that Florence was going to be like Milan with a lot of people trying to take advantage of tourists but everyone that we've seen in the streets seems friendly.  Most of the people I've seen have been smiling, watching a busker, or drinking a glass of wine.  We spent sometime on a bridge that has gold stalls during the day but at night typically has a man playing the guitar with a large crowd listening to the acoustic rock songs (both Italian and English/American!).  Oh and the piazza's!  There are large squares around almost every church which seem to be mere hundreds of yards away from each other.  Our hostel is near the statue of David's original location (it's indoors around here somewhere now...) and that piazza had a girl playing the most beautiful classical guitar tunes.  I'm looking forward to seeing the town in the day time.  Thanks for reading!

Nice platform (left) and trian to Florence (right).  We spent seven hours in total on trains today.  A little sleeping, a little homework, a little chess, and a little bit of playing with our cameras haha.

They had a whole museum dedicated to boats like this (miniature models) but it was too expensive for us.

Genoa is a very industrial port city.

Playing with the "sparkle" effect on my camera with Brendan on the train to Florence.

Typical residential road (left) in Genoa with a million mopeds and the pastel colored buildings and Via Garibaldi (right) with a lot of beautiful architecture.