Spring Break, the Adventure Begins

Wow, where do I even begin when it comes to explaining to you all my trip to Italy.  There really is no good place to start, but I'll start by saying this.  Wow.  Italy was cool, but I definitely wouldn't go back unless I had a tour doing all the work for me.  I really understand now how hard it is to plan everything and how much time, money and effort it takes to do everything, especially planning big trips like this one.  But overall, I had an amazing experience traveling around Italy for a week.

Unsuspecting Enthusiastic Backpackers :)

I'll start with Friday when I left for Bologna, Italy.  I packed the night before in my wonderful green backpack.  Yup, that's right, all I brought with me for a 8 day trip was my backpack, stuff to the brim because I don't have anything bigger than that, or smaller than my giant suitcase.  So i stuffed my backpack with 3 shirts, a pair of jeans, and other necessities, that's it.  So I left Friday morning, met with my friends at the bus stop to the main bus station to take us to Málaga.  We hopped on the bus and got our tickets to Málaga for 2, our flight wasn't until 8:30 so it worked out great.  We waited at the bus stop for about an hour and then went to the bus area where all the buses were.  Lesson learned:  Don't just relay on the bus gate that they tell you, because they lie.  We didn't check the board to see which gate our bus was at so we waited for 15 min at the wrong gate.  Then we realized it was 2, when our bus was supposed to leave, and no one was there yet.  So we hurriedly asked the bus driver and he told us our bus was waaaay over yonder.  So we ran to the right bus and barely got on in time.  But no worries, we made it.  But we should have known that was only the beginning of our epic adventures for the night.  But here's a pic of us all excited and ready to go in Granada!

Good old American food

So we narrowly miss our bus, then we arrived in Málaga and looked for the shuttle to take us to the airport.  Along the way we met a really nice girl from Michigan who's teaching in Granada for a year.  She's been teaching through a program here and knows 4 languages.  It was really neat to talk with her, and the 4 of us whittled away our time in the airport together and chatted.  Then it was time for us to depart, but we exchanged names so we can possible meet again this semester.  Then we hopped on our flight to Bolonga!! Our flight left at 8:30 or so, so we took off super excited to head to Italy.  Finally!! On our way there were reminisced about our first flight to Malaga and how we were so scared and spring break seemed so far away.  We arrived in Bologna at about 11:30 or so and caught a shuttle bus over to the train station for our train to Rome.  We were soo hungry by then that all we wanted was good old American fast food.  Well guess what, we found some!! Yup, we were Americans and went to the McDonald's that was 10 feet away from the gas station.  We hadn't really eaten anything all day so we started off our trip with American fast food...typical. 

Then we decided to wait around, we hung around outside for a bit because it was really nice outside.  But after being approached by 1 drunk Italian and a weird couple we decided to migrate inside.  Our night train didn't leave till 2:17 so we had quite a while to wait.  We explored, found our platform and then entertained waiting in the bathroom because there was music, and it was reallly clean.  I should have taken a picture but you had to pay to get inside so it was nice and clean, well lit and relatively safe considering someone would have to pay if they wanted to get in there.  After the next experience we all said, "we really should have waited in there". 

Now no worries, nothing really dangerous happened but the following events really scared us.  So we were waiting around in the train station, it's around 1:30 and we were literally just standing there watching a guy put up the big posters on the wall.  It's actually really cool how they do it because they put sticky stuff on the back and it's in seperate pieces.  So we're watching them put up a sign when two police officers walk into the station and approach us.  They promptly ask us for ID and we present them our passports.  Now we're figuring they are just checking to make sure we have ID on us like we have been warned occasionally happens in Spain.  So we present them with ID and then they pulled out a paper and radios.  Then we started getting nervous and my friend Abby promptly puts her finger over her Passport and asks them why they are taking down our information and for a badge.  Well the wonderful Italian policemen who know almost zero English merely say to us "it's normal control" and that they're badges are in the station.  So naturally we got nervous and pressed the matter more (meanwhile we're saying this all in Spanish because that's the closest language to Italian) and then one of the officers looks at me and says she's being a problem, she's harassing a police officer and we'll arrest her if she doesn't back off.  They had guns and cuffs so we backed off and resolved to talk to someone about the matter when they were finished.  So they finish, give us back our passports and walk away laughing (jerks).  We quickly found another police officer in the station and told him what happened, he talked to guys who were dressed the same as our guys and return to us saying it was normal control and we have nothing to worry about. 

Naturally this doesn't really calm our nerves very much because the other police officer still really only spoke Italian and only vaguely understood our problem.  But it was finally time for our train to leave and we got on the night train very shaken and resolved to go to the US Embassy the next day.  Well there wasn't an embassy we could go to in Rome because it was the weekend but in Florence we went there and told them what happened.  They were also confused and told us to email an address.  So we drafted an email address and they got back to us with a basic explanation.  While they said that they had never heard of that happening they checked with their contacts in Bologna.  Well apparently the police station doesn't really know what happened or why that happened but their best guess is that they were private officers who basically were bored and just wanted to play a trick on American Tourists.  They said they weren't imposters because they don't usually have pistols on them.  So our conclusion was that the cops were bored and thought it would be funny to make us scared.  JERKS!  That's our conclusion about the stupid city of Bologna, and I'm not returning to that stupid city again.  But everything is fine and we were really smart about the whole situation.  We have nothing to worry about, but the Embassy knows so IF something crops up, it's not like we didn't tell someone. 

Now, after that wonderful encounter we got on our train where we were all in separate cabins but were able to sleep for a little bit of the ride there.  My friend was in a cabin with Chileans so she didn't sleep much, but she got to practice her Spanish!  We finally arrived in Rome at 6:30 a.m and found our hostel only a 5 min walk from the train station.  We stayed at a place called Freedom Traveler Hostel.  We couldn't check in but we were able to drop our stuff and grab breakfast before our full day of exploring Rome.  So we got a 1 euro breakfast down the street and went back to leave our bags in the baggage room.  When we returned later we got our room.  Turns out our room wasn't in the same building, but down the street and we had our own apartment style room.  It was sweet!! We had our own bedroom and a shared bathroom with only 4 other people.  It was perfect because we had our own private room basically, and it was only like 22 euro a night! Score!

But that pretty much wraps up my first night.  I'm going to start a new post about my first day in Rome because there's tons of pictures and stuff to talk about.  But it was certainly an interesting first night!!

Until the next post, love you all. <3