Siena

After sleeping in my garden shack my 2nd night in Cinque Terre, I got up, grabbed some breakfast and headed to the train station to catch the 11:00 to Pisa.

At Pisa, I wanted to find an Internet cafe to book a hostel in Florence, but Italy on Sunday is like Provo on Sunday...except NOTHING is open in Italy.

After walking for a while I decided I was close enough to the leaning tour to keep walking. So I walked and walked (carrying my pack), got there, took a few pictures of myself and walked back to the train station.

While I was waiting for my train to Florence, I pulled out my travel guide to read up on things to do there. EVERYONE says you have to go to the Ufizzi museum, so I read up on that. Turns out its closed on Monday (the day I was gonna be in Florence). So I left the platform and went to the ticket office to see if I could go to Siena instead, with the intention of going to Florence in a day or two. It was super easy to change my ticket and so I was off to Siena.

I had a connection in Empoli and the combined effects of Sunday and a railway strike (apparently common in Italy) delayed me and some Canadians there for a couple hours.

When I got to Siena, I set out to find what as best as I could tell was the only hostel in Siena...a 20 minute bus ride out of town. I waited for the bus to town, but as I went to step onto the bus, the driver hurried and shut the door and sped away (this happened twice in Siena).

I finally got on a bus with the ill-conceived notion that any bus would take me to the center of town. After a scenic and time-consuming ride through suburban Tuscany I jumped off the bus at a random stop and decided to get on the first bus heading back where I came from. While I waited I called the hostel and booked a bed. To my pleasant surprise I also saw while waiting that my guidebook told me which bus number to take to the hostel - and I was waiting at the stop for that bus number. I boarded the bus a half hour or so later and after winding back through the suburbs I arrived at...you guessed it...the train station. Apparently the guide book I bought in April is out-of-date.

To make a long and frustrating story short, I finally made it to the hostel which was an interesting conglomoration of the feelings elicited from hospitals and elementary schools. I was stoked to see that the rooms were small - only three people - and I only had one other guy in mine. I went across the street to get some (very good) pizza and headed up to my room to discover that my roommate was a 50 or so year-old Romanian who was chain smoking in his underwear on the bed in the room.

I switched rooms.

The next morning, I headed into Siena and took in the sights, sounds, and tastes of Tuscany. It was a lot of fun. In the early evening, I ran into some people I met in Cinque Terre and got some food with them. Then I used my phone card I bought from the canadians in the Empoli train station to call home, talked with mom and dad and then caught the late bus back to the hostel. Good times in Siena.