Part One: Lucca and Getting to Ischia

So, this weekend was super busy and it is definitely going to take me more than one entry to write about it, which is why this is part one...

Thursday morning, we had class in the city (toured Santa Maria Novella-the church not the train station, and the Boboli Gardens) and left right away on our travels. We spent the afternoon in Lucca, which is a small town near Florence. It is still a completely walled city, and the walls are actually wide enough that they have paved a bike path on top of them and you can rent a bike and ride all the way around the city. So we did that a few times, and then wandered the town doing some shopping. We had heard that there was supposed to be this really big Medieval festival going on too, with people all dressed up and stuff, but apparently this was a type-o in my guidebook because the festival definitely was NOT huge, it was like 5 people and the actual festival is in September. Hmmmm...so we had booked a night train out of Lucca, and had until 12:30am to hang out, so we picked a restaurant out of the guide book and had a really long dinner with lots of local wine. We found a gelateria (the only thing in small towns open late) and hung out playing cards and "Never have I ever" until it was close to time to catch our train...which is when things got interesting.

We had bought our tickets from the train website, and had to go from Lucca to Pisa, and then to Naples. Well, somewhere we missed the memo that sometimes when you buy your tickets from the train website you actually have to catch a bus...so we were like freaking out because we couldn't find our "train" listed on the departures, and ran into this random guy and asked him, and luckily he was local and knew that it was a bus we needed. So we got on our bus, and arrived in Pisa, only to find out we had like an hour and a half wait for our train to Naples (Pisa is completely empty at night-its a super small town actually) and then one girl in our group realized that her bag was "stolen." (We later called the train station in Pisa and found out that really she was just drunk and forgot it lol). So, we were all kind of on edge when we got on our train for Naples, and we somehow all had tickets in separate cars in the train so we were split up and that sucked. I got lucky and only had 2 other people in my "room" so I got to stretch out and actually slept really well. But everyone else had horror stories from having to sit up awake the entire time to getting jipped out of money on a breakfast that wasn't actually free, or spilling pear juice everywhere. Quite the adventure apparently...and upon reaching Naples, everyone was exhausted.

I already hate Naples, and was completely paranoid the entire time that I was going to run into the cop from last week, so we kind of rushed out of the train station, caught a cab to the port, and just barely made our ferry for Ischia. Five minutes into the ride, all of the other 7 girls were asleep. It was about an hour ferry ride, and we accidentally got off at the wrong city in Ischia first, and for some reason, I happened to ask the guy unloading the boat at the dock if where we were was Forio, and he was like nope-that is the next stop...so random luck saved us from wandering the wrong city looking for a hostel that wouldn't be located there. Finding the hostel in the correct city was hard enough, the streets were tiny and really winding and I was positive that we never were going to find it, but we did, and I'll finish writing about the rest of the weekend in my next post...I'm in serious need of some sleep right now...