Italy thoughts part 1

It may be unsolicited but here is my advice to you should you be heading to Italy soon, or ever.

First advice is: GO! it was so wonderfully amazing to be in Italy, a beautiful country filled with more than it's fair share of beautiful things. When you do go, I would recommend trying to go in the off season, i.e. not summer, so that you don't have to always be surrounded by hoards of people, especially at museums etc.

Moving on, if you want the stamp in your passport, then it needs to be the first place in the EU that you visit. My first and only stamp in my passport is from France because we flew through Paris. It was sort of disappointing. Also, I'm not sure how or why but we never actually went through customs or anything like that going into France or Italy. Odd.
Driving: I would not want to ever drive in Italy, especially not in Rome, we opted not to drive when we went and we are so glad! The rides too and from the airport were a bit terrifying as we darted into lanes at the last second and drove down the middle of the road, speeding up and then coming to sudden stops. If you're going to drive in Italy, make sure that you know what you're in for and that you're up for it. Another reason I'm glad we didn't drive is that parking would have been a nightmare, there's not a lot of parking space. Where do Italians park? The better question would be, where don't they park.


Place to stay: consider renting an apartment, and if you do and you're traveling with a small group, talk to me and I'll find the info about the amazing place we stayed. It was really nice, it was a short walk from the Metro and our landlord was very kind and helpful. Getting back to the Metro, I highly recommend that you find a place to stay that's not far from a Metro stop and that it's on the A line not the B line. The A line goes to most touristy places, and most trains are very nice and air conditioned. We tried to go on the B line as little as possible. We first went on the B line to get to the Colosseum, up until that time we always rode on the A line which is nice and clean and new. The B line train pulled up covered in graffiti, quite full, and non air conditioned. We were not impressed, and the return trip was worse, apparently it was when everyone rides the train, we were amazed to make it in the car and sure we were going to be pick pocketed. After that we avoided the B line like the plague, the only exception was to see Michelangelo's Moses at the St. Peter in Chains church, on the B line. If you must use the B line I'd recommend doing it earlier in the day or trying to figure out when busy times are (I didn't really manage this) and avoid it then.

I'm realizing how long this post will be and perhaps I should make it more than one post but I wanted to make sure and say how kind and helpful the majority of the people were. We many times asked for help and were kindly directed, etc. Thank you Italians for not being fed up with tourists.

A Journey to Italy

I just got back from an amazing trip to Italy with two of my best friends, we went for about 10 days to Rome, Florence, Lucca, Pisa and then back to Rome. It was such an awesome trip! I'll try and blog about it all in the next few days.
This was my first time getting a passport, and going off the continent. We took, what for me was a first transatlantic flight to Paris. The flight was long and somewhat miserable as 9+ hours on a plane can be, there were overhead movies projected, but they were all pretty stupid. Airplane food turned out to be not too terrible, not wonderful by any means, but not to bad for what it was. We had dinner and then breakfast on the flight over. We made it to Paris and that was the stamp we got in our passports (which was sort of disappointing for me, I wanted an Italian stamp). Anyway we were enjoying Charles Degual (sp?) airport and I had a delicious croissant there. Our problems started when our names came up on the screen telling us to report to a desk, this we tried to do but only stood in lines that didn't move. We gave up on the lines and got on our flight to Italy. In Italy we eventually discovered that our checked bags were still in Paris. The man we talked to told us that it was a fairly common occurrence and that we should get our bags in about 24 hours.
I would like to recommend that if you check a bag, you make sure that you have some essentials like socks and underwear in your carry on. Our bags, didn't get back to us until half way through our trip and so we had to get creative with what we had, washing socks etc. in the sink and hanging them up to dry was all too common. When we did get our luggage back we all had a small item or two missing, in my case a brand new package of socks and a tube of sunscreen, we have no idea why that happened. Also be wary of Air France, that's who we had this trouble with.
The plane trip back home was much more enjoyable because we had a plane with individual screens and so we could pick what we watched. Happily our luggage made the entire trip with us on the way back.
More to come on the trip. PS, we had a wonderful trip, but if you ever go to Italy, do it in the off season to avoid sharing the sights with a bajillion other people everywhere you go.