First stop: Bergamo

I'm finally going to get this all down in writing. It's slipping from my mind and I can't lose any more of the details. This stuff happened almost three months ago. I'm such a procrastinator. I hope I don't forget too much stuff.



Well, May 21st Sohae and I packed up all our stuff, said goodbye to our host families and moved everything to our friend Allison's apartment. We each had one carry on. We squeezed everything we needed for a month of traveling into a RyanAir approved carry on (and man are they strict!). So really we each had about a weeks worth of clothes. (We had to make sure a few of our hostels had washing machines). Then we headed out.

We flew from Alicante to Bergamo, which is about an hours drive from Milan. We had trouble from the very beginning. We had to take a bus from the airport into the city and when we got on the bus, we didn't see a place to buy tickets. Nobody paid the driver or anything. We were so confused. Surely this ride couldn't be free. But we just sat quietly, trying to look for our stop. But we quickly realized that the stops weren't labeled so we got progressively more and more worried. After a while on the bus we just decided to get off and figure things out. So we did. We walked into a hotel and crossed our fingers, hoping they spoke English. And they did! Thanks goodness. They were so kind and gave us a map of the city and pointed out where we were and where we needed to go. And actually, had we just gotten off at the next bus stop, we would have been at our hostel. But it was a quick walk and we found our place.

Now, to save money we only rented one single person room instead of a room for two people. We really were trying to cut costs. And the place was really just an apartment were you could rent a room for however many days you needed, unlike the dorm style of normal hostels. So I checked in and put our stuff upstairs in our room and then Sohae and I just wandered around the city.

There are two parts to Bergamo, the Upper City and the Lower City. The Upper City is the older part of two with all the cathedrals and stuff so we took the funicular up to the old city and just walked. This is when I really felt like I'd arrived in Italy. All the cobblestone streets and the old buildings. It felt so romantic. I could just imagine all the people that had walked these streets, how people lived in Bergamo for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years! Mindblowing.

Well then we stopped to get our first gelato. And we fell into a routine. This would be our first day of about 18 straight days of gelato....

We called it a night around midnight and headed back to the hostel/apartment. We played rock/paper/scissors to see who got the bed and who got the thin foam mattress that we took out of the crib in the room. I won :) But I gave her the pillow. We woke up the next morning and explored the Upper City again and tried to get into a few museums but they were too expensive. We found some nice monuments though and then we found a place on the edge of the Upper City that had a beautiful panoramic of the surrounding area. It was so typically Italian.

Then we headed back down to the Lower (modern) City. Now here's where my memory gets a little fuzzy. Did we look for a place for food? I don't remember. But I do remember that we made our way to the train station to purchase our tickets for the train to Venice. We waited in line and I asked the man at the counter for two tickets and he said no. "Uh, excuse me?" He told us that there was a train strike today. "Excuse me???" We kinda freaked out. So found a tourist office and they told us that they couldn't help us. They said that maybe the strike would be over later in the day. So we found a park and waited and waited. We walked around looking for a place to eat and didn't really find much. We had to settle on a restaurant with pretty basic, yet surprisingly expensive, pasta dishes.

Then I went back to check the trains a few hours later and nothing had changed. So we decided to find an internet cafe so we could email the hotel in Venice to tell them we'd be late but not cancel our reservation. Then we walked some more and found a different hostel and we booked two beds and dropped off our stuff. Luckily they had free computers and wifi so we got a few things sorted out. But needless to say, we were mad. So we took a short nap and walked around again and found another restaurant and abated our sorrows with dinner, dessert, and a bottle of our new favorite wine, Pinot Grigio. After dinner we headed to bed so we could rise early and catch an early train to Venice.