Saturday night was Sommernachtstraum (Summer Night’s Dream) in Olympia Park. After packing and cleaning all day, Matt, Kristina, Amy and I met in Olympia Park with blankets and settled down to wait. It was basically a huge festival with tons of food (German food…) and live music and some carnival games for the kids. When it got dark around 10 it was time for the fireworks. The show was amazing. It was synced to music with an additional fire show and laser light show. The fireworks were set off both behind us on Olympia Hill and directly in front of us over the lake. There were 4 tons of fireworks and a 45 minute show. It was awesome.
The next morning was my trip to Austria. I went to the lake with Lisa that afternoon. I spent Monday morning with Andrea in the shop and in the afternoon I walked around Hall. Monday night I went back to Munich.
Tuesday morning Traci arrived. I picked her up at the airport in the morning and she got to help me clean after that. Kristina had borrowed a vacuum from her aunt who lives in Munich so after we both vacuumed we took it back to her aunt’s along with her stuff since she was leaving it with her for the week of Italy. Then we met up with Matt on Marienplatz and walked around for a while before all heading to Hofbrauhaus to meet Erika and Tim for our going away dinner in tourist central. The food was good though and very German of course. Erika and Tim had to go back to study for more exams, so Kristina, Matt and I headed to an outdoor café to get dessert. The night ended with saying goodbye to Matt and me dropping my stuff off in Jaakko, my Finnish friend’s room. He lives in Olympizentrum but was going to be gone the same time we were so he had given me a key to leave my stuff in his room. We set our alarms for 3 am and went to bed at 11 pm.
The next “morning” if you can call it that, Kristina, Traci and I grabbed the backpacks we would be living out of for the next week and left our rooms in Olympiazentrum for the last time. We dropped off our keys in a mailbox and noted the people who were hanging out outside who hadn’t gone to bed yet… we boarded the first subway of the morning at 4:17 to the main station and then our 4:40 am train to Memmingen. That’s when I opened my bag to grab our boarding passes since I had printed them all out… and they weren’t there. They had been there last night because we had had to call the hostel in Rome to reconfirm our booking 24 hours in advance. I was well aware they were not in the room as I had double checked every cabinet and drawer before leaving. I had no idea where they were but they were not there. The thing about RyanAir is, that though it’s an insanely cheap airline (20 Euro round trip to Pisa from Munich), they can afford to do this because they charge you for absolutely everything. If you forget your boarding pass, for example, it’s 40 Euro to reprint. It was 5 am and we were in the middle of Bavaria where nothing opens before 9 am. It didn’t look good. We had to switch trains in Buchloe. As we’d only had 3 minutes to switch and we were running 5 minutes late we were already worried about that. Then we jumped off the train and realized that our connection was running 30 minutes late. There went any hope of finding an internet café in Memmingen before we got to the airport. We wouldn’t have time. Buchloe looked pretty empty. At Kristina’s insistence though, we dashed over to the main office. There was no one there. I spotted a German smoking outside the entrance and decided to ask him. Sure enough he was from Buchloe. He directed us to a casino a block away. A casino with internet access and a printer. Wow. We rushed over, nearly tripped over the cleaning lady and launched at the computers. I reprinted out our boarding passes and hostel information and we raced back to the train station… with ten minutes to spare. Crisis averted. We boarded the train to Memmingen feeling much more relieved and much more awake. Once at the airport things went smoothly. We made it through security, boarded the plane and instantly fell asleep. We woke up as we were circling Pisa. The plane landed 30 minutes early somehow (it was a 1:40 minute flight). We bought a bus ticket to the city center and quickly realized we were more out of our element than we had ever been in any other country in Europe. No one spoke English. Everyone, on the other hand, spoke Italian and they all expected us too as well. Kristina found this out when a man on the bus started loudly talking to her in Italian and when she responded with a blank stare and “I don’t know what you’re saying”, he continued to speak loudly in Italian at her. Helpful. We somehow managed to find the right stop and wandered in the right direction until we finally came upon the Field of Miracles, the location of the Leaning Tower. If you aren’t aware, the Leaning Tower is not the only tourist attraction of Rome. The Field of Miracles is a set of four buildings, all equally white. There’s the baptistery, the church and the mausoleum and then the bell tower, which leans. The first three represent the three stages of life: birth, God and death. As it is 15 Euro to walk up to the top of the tower we settled with photos and then wandered up the strip of souvenir stands set up along the field before stopping at one of the food stands for a Panini. Yummy. Italian food is tasty. Pisa took us about 2 hours so we found our way back to the train station and bought our 17 Euro tickets to Rome. The train ride that followed was not the most pleasant experience of the trip. I forgot to mention the thing we noted when we stepped off the plane in Pisa. It was hot. Like really hot. Especially compared to the Munich summer Kristina and I had been experiencing. There 85 is pretty hot. Pisa was well in the nineties and very sunny. This wasn’t a huge problem walking around as compared to St. Louis it was very not humid which makes all the difference and the shade was quite bearable… but then we realized that the train was not air-conditioned. The train was very crowded. The train was a 4 hour’s ride. The train was fairly miserable. We were dying and we were out of water.
When the train finally got to Rome, we scrambled off and then spent the next hour lost and wandering around the main train station because we were lost and couldn’t find our hostel. And because nobody could speak English and help us even though we were in Rome, which we had assumed would be tourist central. After two people shook their heads and spoke Italian at us and one newspaper stand man sent us in what we later found out was the exact opposite direction, we finally found a woman who, though she spoke no English either, directed us the right way through use of sign language. Straight ahead. There will be an arch. Go under it. Straight ahead.
And then we found the hostel. Almost anyway. We got to the proper street number and realized there was no hostel. Luckily we got there right when other people staying there did and they led us up. See it was in an apartment type building and just had a few of the rooms… very confusing and kinda awkward to navigate. We went up to the 2nd floor to check in and were led to the 1st floor to get to our room. Exhausted, we dropped our stuff on our beds and came to the very disappointing realization that our hostel had no air-conditioning as well. See, when Kristina and I booked the hostels back in June we had seen certain hostels advertising their AC. But, living in Munich’s autumn like summer we had laughed and thought that was a stupid thing to advertise. Now we realized that we were the stupid ones.
The hostel was offering a free dinner that night, completely randomly, so we stuck around for the pasta and wine, a true Italian meal. Afterwards we wandered outside around our hostel for a bit and happened across gelato (as it is very hard not to). The ice cream is pretty much the same as in Munich, but where Munich gives you one tiny scoop for 80 cents (which I thought was cheap…), Rome gave us three huge slabs for 2 euro. Very happy we headed back to the hostel and collapsed in our beds. And with that I’ll end the Pisa post.
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