Those 3 words were probably used a billion times during my 6 day trip to Italy last week.
Now let me just tell you, Italy was absolutely amazing!
I didn’t realize though, that English was not very prominent in Verona where 2 other group members and I decided to stay at.
We learned Ciao pretty quickly since we heard it everywhere. It’s neat that it can be used both as hello and good bye. How convenient is that?

I personally was a little spoiled in thinking that I would only need to know ciao (hello/bye), scusi (excuse me), and grazie (thank you) in order to make it through my week just fine – I had assumed that English would be pretty well spoken there.
I was wrong.
As soon as we got to our B&B where we stayed for 4 nights, we realized our assumption was wrong. The B&B was more like experiencing a stay with a host family. It was a large, beautiful home owned by an old Italian couple. And they spoke barely any English. This was a problem to us since the city centre of Verona was actually about a 25 minute car ride away and we couldn’t figure out how to get there at first. However, the couple were such sweethearts (we decided to call them our host grandpa and host grandpa amongst ourselves!) and they appreciated every effort we made in speaking Italian.

The first night that we flew in to Italy, we were all so exhausted that we didn’t do a whole a lot. But on the second day there, we had planned to take a day trip to Venice! At the Verona train station, we met up with 3 other more members of our C-90 group and all 6 of us headed to Venice together. Being in Venice was a bit more of a relief since the language barrier wasn’t as big here. Most shopkeepers came up to talk to us in English, and flatter us so that we will buy their things haha. None of us had specific monuments or buildings that we wanted to see in Venice; we all just wanted to wonder around and take it all in. And Venice was just absolutely beautiful. It really is a town that’s floating on water, and the houses are all so colorful and adorable!

I’m not a huge fan of tourist-y areas, but Venice gave you the feeling of home but at the same time it was a complete foreign place. It really was a magical time being there!

On the second and third days, we spent it in Verona.
The bus system from our B&B (Negrar, Italy) to Verona was very confusing and we didn’t really understand it during our entire stay there. But we did figure out how to get to Verona’s city centre so that was a relief. Verona was also another adorable city. It didn’t seem as ancient as Venice, but still had the look of having long history behind it. Although the buildings were older, there was a main street with lots of modern stores, mostly for clothing and accessories. Those were definitely fun to window shop at (:

A group of us decided to go see a castle on top of a hill, and the view was absolutely beautiful! It was a long way up, but definitely worth it. Not to mention we also got a little bit of nice, warm sun!

On our 4th morning, we bid adieu (or ciao in our case) to our host grandparents to head to Florence. Even though we didn’t get to have long conversations with them, we were able to communicate in bits and pieces and that was such a great feeling. Going to a country not knowing the language, but still being able to connect to someone can bring such happy feelings!
I decided to travel to Florence by myself while the group left a little bit before me because of train situations. It was only traveling by train, but it was a great feeling traveling by myself in a foreign country. The other group members made sure I was okay, and we met up once I got to Florence. Now Florence was a little different that Venice and Verona. It has a bit more contemporary feel to it. The buildings looked a bit different and there were many more English speaking people. My highlight in Florence was probably seeing the duomo. There were so many intricate details on the building I couldn’t even imagine someone creating it.

I only spent about 3 hours there but it was great. That night we headed to Pisa, our final destination.
On our final day, we spent the day in Pisa. Of course we had to go see the Leaning Tower. And it really was leaning! I didn’t realize this, but there were also 2 other church related buildings right next to the leaning tower.

We were all pretty tired this day since we had to carry around our heavy backpacks. There was a nice patch of green grass next to the leaning tower of Pisa and we decided to take an advantage of that and laid out and enjoyed the almost 80s weather. I’d like to think that I was able to get a bit of tan on! The weather was absolutely beautiful and it was such a great moment and the best way to end our amazing week at Italy.

I was able to see some beautiful buildings, views, and adorable houses during my trip and also learn the struggles of a language barrier which was a great experience for me. I enjoyed every minute of my stay in Italy and I definitely want to go back again! Next time, I will hopefully know a little more Italian though (:

 

Cheers until next time!

Aya