My sister arrived today! Despite a transportation strike (which are quite common in Rome unfortunately), I managed to get to the airport to pick her up. We returned to the train station later that evening, though, to catch a train to Florence, because we were going there and then Venice for a long weekend. It was nice to revisit Florence (or Firenze as it’s called here) since I had only been there for a day during our academic excursion to Tuscany.

We arrived late Friday evening only to find there was a public transportation strike in Florence as well! Avoiding the mile-long taxi stand line at the train station, we decided to walk a couple blocks away to try to find one. Fortunately we didn’t have to walk too far before I spotted one dropping off someone at a restaurant in an alleyway. We flagged him down, and he took us to our hotel. After dropping off our luggage and settling in a bit, we needed some nourishment before turning in for the night. So we headed back into the cold (much colder north in Tuscany than the warm winter weather of Rome) to find a restaurant.

We managed to find a trattoria not too far away that was actually a vegetarian Italian restaurant (fortunate for me!). It had some interesting and tasty dishes—I tried a risotto dish and a cheese crepe, and my sister tried some pasta in vodka sauce. After finishing with some tiramisu, we returned to the street decorated with arches of Christmas lights to do a little exploring of Florence night life. We found a cute wine bar a little down the road and stopped in for a glass. It had a nice atmosphere and it was great to relax and catch up with my sister! However, we were quite exhausted, and my jet-lagged sister was about to collapse by the time we returned to the hotel to sleep late that night.

Posted by Lisa at 05:25 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Alright, a little bit of progress has been made, for those of you holding your breath regarding my Vatican adventures. I’m trying to steer away from any illicit entering of the city, so I’ve been exploring more lawful ways of getting in and seeing as much as I can.

I’ve been asking my professors and people I’ve met who live here if they’ve ever been in Vatican City, and if so, how. And I got lucky when I recently asked my English teacher if she’d ever been in the Vatican, and she said that she actually had gone on a tour a couple of weeks ago that took her through more of the Vatican than she’d ever seen before. I immediately asked for details.

Apparently, there’s a recently opened archeological tour of a necropolis (city of the dead/ burial site), and that in going to the sites on the tour, you get to walk through a good portion of the secretive Vatican City. So, my professor emailed me the information about how to make a reservation, and I’ll hopefully be embarking on this tour with my sister in early December! I can’t wait!

Btw, a funny little fact about the Vatican…it has its own bank, and the bank’s ATMs are the only in the world where Latin is a language option for when you make a transaction!

Posted by Lisa at 05:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)