Cinque Terre and Milan

Friday morning we were up super early (6 am...woof!) to catch a train to Cinque Terre! Cinque Terre means "five lands" and it is made up of five BEAUTIFUL villages on the coast of the Italian Riviera!

We were staying in Levanto, which is not one of the five villages however it is a 2 hour hike away from Monterosso, one of the villages! By train it is even closer, but who would want to do things the easy way?!

We got there and walked to the hostel/checked in and then decided that we were going to hike from Levanto to Monterosso. 

First things first? SUSTENANCE! 

We couldn't find a restaurant and were about to eat our hands and then WA LA here we are!

Levanto is nick-named the "slow town", and being at that restaurant we learned exactly why.

I am exaggerating when I say it took around a million hours for our food to come out, but it sure did feel like it! It was good though and our bellies were nice and full to start our trek!

Note how we are getting higher up/further away from this water!

We got to a certain point and we didn't think it was physically possible to keep going up. BUT IT WAS! 

Everything we saw was so beautiful and it was great to be outside and just take it all in. 

We had a certain order to walking/passing the backpack. I was the line leader, fearlessly blazing our trail and bumping beats with my itouch (nothing like some taylor swift for a friday hike!)

Then Marlene and last but certainly not least Devon!

Devon told us a lovely tale about how she is not that great at walking (something about tripping at graduation), and lo and behold this proved to be true! She may or may not have fallen on the hike....

NEVER FEAR she was okay! And I may or may not have fallen myself because like the brilliant girl that I am I was trying to walk and take a video of something behind me. Yes that is right my fall is on video. CUTE

We hiked and hiked and hiked some more and made it into Monterosso!

Got some lemonades and hit the beach and took a LOVELY nap by the water :)

From Monterosso we took the train into Vernazza. It was SUCH a beautiful small town and very picture-esque.

Spot the umbrella-girl:

We through the town and decided to get a drink before leaving! So we went to the Blue Marlin and asked the bar-tender what he reccommended and he said "I reccomend that you sit and relax and try something local"

So we had a watermelon-banana drink! (With possibly some rum but I'll never tell)

Then we went into Manarola and WOW. 

WOW. If I lived there I think I would pass out from how pretty it is all the time. It was great. And we were there in time for the sunset!

Do you see the face?!

There were two towns left but it was dark so we decided to head back to the hostel and hit them up before we left for Milan the next morning.

WELL we are on the train going back and we didn't have the right ticket. No one had checked our tickets all day so we figured we'd be fine and didn't think twice.

NO such luck! While the train was still moving we saw this mass exodus of kids our age, probably 8 or 9 people and we hear the word "fine"

WE BOOKED IT! Without thinking it was get up and follow them because there was NO way that we were going to get fined yet again for not having tickets validated.

So the kids that we were hiding with were going to jump off the train and get back on, but I was NOT interested in that we were going to get tickets. We told them our horror story of Pisa/Spring Break and we all got off at Corniglia to get tickets.

The ticket station was closed.

The next train was not for an hour.

There are 150 something steps to get into the town.

So we stayed and waited for the next train while befriending some kids from Notre Dame!

The next morning we went into the last town and then got our train to Milan!

Milan was cool and all but it was not my favorite. I'M SORRY MILAN! 

Know what was cool? The Nas and Damien Marley concert!

Damien Marley's dreadlocks go down to the floor. THE FLOOR! That is not even an exaggeration they actually touch the floor! His head must be so heavy.

The concert was really cool, I wished with my whole heart that Sean and Matty could have been there to enjoy it with me! I have never seen so many dreadlocked folks in one place!

We woke up the next morning and had a train back to Florence, all in all a very successful weekend!