Finally, sun!

After packing up the last of our things, we left Siena via train and began the trip to Cinque Terre, located on Italy's Western coast. "Cinque Terre" translates to "Five Lands;" a fitting name for the five small and colorful coastal towns. The train ride itself was not too long, with a couple transfers here and there, and it only took us a few hours total to arrive at our final destination. Our stop was Riomaggiore, the southernmost town of Cinque Terre, and the town where we would be staying for the rest of the program. The fact that it was a beautiful 80-something degrees and sunny outside was perhaps the greatest source of my excitement initially as I walked off the platform with my luggage. Our hotel was located in a fairly central part of the small town, on the other side of the hill from the train station. In order to get there, we had to walk through a long underground tunnel that would lead us right to the action of it all. The tunnel's walls were covered with fragments of multicolored tiles and there were shells embedded into the walls, as the five towns sit right on the edge of the Mediterranean sea. A flute player sat in the middle of the tunnel (good acoustics, I suppose), and her music added a whole other level of ambiance to my first experience at Cinque Terre. Once in the main part of Riomaggiore, we had to drag our luggage up a long, very steep, and crowded street. It was so much to take in all at once; the bright colors of the buildings, the slightly humid sea air, and the huge hill we were forced to climb! Unlike some of the other students in the group, I only had one suitcase with me, and I was very glad I had chosen not to pack even one shirt or dress more. Once we arrived at the front of the hotel, sweating and relieved, we were were given our room assignments. One of the girls who I traveled with at the start of the trip and I were assigned to the first room, and I was able to have a short amount of down time to settle in and change into some cooler clothes. The first evening was pretty laid back, and we weren't assigned anything to do as far as classwork. Several of the girls from the group and I decided to walk around Riomaggiore and explore, and we soon found ourselves at the port area of the town near the sea. We got a quick take-away dinner at a restaurant and then spent the rest of the evening enjoying the beautiful weather and scenery at a little bar that overlooked the Mediterranean. I really enjoyed these small moments, glad to have escaped the rain and cold that plagued our first week.

The first picture shows part of the hotel's exterior where we would be staying, and the second one was taken out of my bedroom's window. Even though this view is undeniably great, I don't think anything will be able to top the panoramic vista from our Siena B&B.

The rest of the images above are just some pictures taken during my first afternoon at Cinque Terre. All the photos were taken in Riomaggiore, since we didn't have time to go out and explore the four other towns after we arrived. The last image is the view from the bar/restaurant where we would return multiple times throughout our stay to end some long and busy days. The waitress there was actually able to remember our group and our drink orders before the end of the week!