Day 4 (Pisa; Florence to Cap d’Ail):
Big travel day today. For the most part, train travel went very smoothly, and we took a 2 ½ hour stop in the lovely city of Pisa, home to the most recognizable tower in the world. The town is actually very nice – beautiful colors and a strong Italian style. The tower itself is swarming with tourists and actually much, much smaller than I expected. Eh, it’s okay – but glad I saw it. There is also a nice cathedral right next door and I had an incredible lunch – gnocchi (little potato-like things) with real crab and a great seafood-y sauce – better yet, it was only like 7 euros.
So by this point, I was worried because I had not yet finished my State Department internship application, which was due that day at 11:59 Eastern Time. I was hoping to find an Internet café in Pisa to finish, but no luck. Plus, it was very hot and I was a bit exhausted, so I put it off to that night, praying that our hostel in Cap d’Ail, France would have Internet.
Back to the trip: Day 4 was a day of a million train stations – Florence to Pisa; Pisa to Genoa (home of Christopher Columbus); Genoa to Ventimiglia (on the border with France); Ventimiglia to Monaco; and finally Monaco to Cap d’Ail, a lovely beach town on the Ligurian Sea.
We arrived at our hostel around 8pm, greeted by an OUTSTANDING view of the sea (check out the pics on Facebook), but also a grumpy owner. This place was originally a palace belonging to a Marquis related to the Prince of Monaco, costing about 20 million euros. Now it is owned by a few people who put up mostly young travelers for only 18 euros per night. A great deal.
Unfortunately, our experience here was marred a bit by safety concerns. Hansky and I had to sleep in a room (without air conditioning and with tons of mosquitoes) with a VERY sketchy guy from New York who did the following things: one, immediately offered to rent us his house in Antibes (a nearby beach town); two, suggested we use a locker to secure our stuff and told us to use the password 1-1-1-1; three, wanted to check his email on my computer; four, made demeaning comments about MT; and five, tried to convince us we should sneak out at night and just hop the fence to get back in. It was impossible to believe a word he was saying – he turned out to be wrong about just about everything and just came off as a criminal himself. So Hansky and I held on tight to our valuables and avoided the guy as long as we could.
Fortunately, they had WiFi. I sat outside with a panoramic view of the sun setting over the ocean and tried to finish my application. Of course, my battery was about to die, so I had to switch to a table next to a plug where a French lady was sitting. We immediately struck up a conversation, which lasted over an hour. I was not too worried about my app since I was almost finished and I could turn it in by 6am actually since that is midnight in the States. What I did not account for was the owner kicking us off to bed at 1am – uh oh. So I decided to put off the application until after waking up (around 5am), giving me an hour to finish.
Today was the day that messed me up for the rest of the trip – first of all, I realized that day that I was covered in spots – unexplainable bites that I eventually determined were bedbugs from the night before in Florence. Second, as I worked on my application outside, I was eaten alive by mosquitoes. Add to this a restless night in which I barely slept 2 hours (a mixture of heat, mosquitoes, worrying about the application, and paranoia about the security of my belongings) and a good deal of sunburn the next day as well as the development of a sty in my eye (my eye began swelling due to the heat), and I was toast.
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