EuroTour Part 2 (Olaszország!)

Italy!

After leaving Ljubljana we drove to our Venice.  We spent a while wandering through the narrow streets.   The city is so cool, filled with little bridges over the canals, narrow streets, and tall buildings.  It was about lunch time when we got there so we all grabbed some pizza and gelato to go.

The amount of detail on some of these european buildings was just astounding.  I'm pretty sure the majority of the pictures I took were just of buildings and pretty water.  The people pictures I have are mostly thanks  to Shirely and Yurina.

It took us a little while, but we made it to the largest bridge in the city.  From there we made our way to the central square.

We got to go on a gondola ride through the city which was probably one of my favorite things we did on eurotour.  It was about an hour long and we went through some really narrow canals in the city.   

From Venice, we went to our next hotel in Bologna.  In the morning we had another five hour ride to Rome.  Because parking is so expensive the bus dropped us off at a train station a little ways out of Rome and we took the train in.  We actually arrived at the Vatican first.

After the Vatican, we took a bus to the Trevi Fountain.  It was absolutely gorgeous but there were so many people crowding around it was nearly impossible to get too close to it.  

We took an open air bus from the fountain to the Colosseum and we passed the Basilica on the way.

Since we were in Rome we decided we had to try Italian ice cream.  It was delicious.  Funnily enough though, Italy was the only country we didn't actually eat any pasta in.

Getting back to the bus from Rome turned into quite the ordeal.  We missed the last bus back to the Vatican so we had to find a metro station, then run to the train station because we were late.  Except we were in a rush and accidentally got on the wrong train.  That, combined with the fact that no one seemed to have heard of the station we originally came from, lead to us not getting back to the bus until about 11 pm.  After these past two weeks though, I think we are now all pros at navigating subway stations.  

EuroTour Part 1

I'm back from Eurotour and it was amazing!!!  I'm going to make a whole bunch of little posts for it because I have way too many pictures and it's taking me forever to get them onto my computer.   

On April 27th Ashlee, Dani (she was visiting our city), and I took the train to Arad, a city in the west of Romania.  There, we met with the other five exchange students and had dinner with some rotarians from Sweden. (I think?).  The next morning we left on the bus for Slovenia.  In total we were eight kids, Ilie (our rotary chaperone), and a husband and wife who were driving the bus the whole time.  It was a twelve person bus so it just fill all of us.  The ride from Romania to Ljubljana (The capital of Slovenia that no one could really pronounce) was really long, we had to go through Hungary.  We got to the hotel in the early evening then headed in to the city to look around.   

Ljubljana, Slovenia

Their city mascot seems to be these dragons.  They're on all the souvenirs and stuff, pretty cute.

For whatever reason, the city was really empty.  It was super quite and there were hardly many people about.  

This bicycle sign amused me because it had a couple of Romanian stickers on it, though you can really only read the one.