Cinque Terre

This post is extremely outdated...

Last month Emily came to visit (yay!) and we made a 4 day trip into Cinque Terre, the five UNESCO-protected villages lining the Italian coast. What seemed like a quick trip into Italy ended up being quite the opposite. Getting to Vernazza, the town we stayed in, involved every mode of transportation except for maybe a mule...Leaving Madrid at 7am we took a subway, airplane, shuttle bus, and two trains, arriving at 9pm in Vernazza. I guess the time we arrived is a bit deceptive, since we had somewhat of a mishap in Génova. Trains in Italy are very cheap and usually pretty efficient, but are not well-marked at all. And apparently the board that lists all the train platforms don't always work very well. So instead of heading on a train to Vernazza from Génova, we boarded a train that was going in the opposite direction. We didn't notice this until I asked the woman next to me (I asked in a mix of Italian and Spanish) if we were heading to Vernazza, and she looks at me, puzzled, and shakes her head. Then she turns to another group of passengers and they all shake their heads, and soon enough the entire train car knows that the two American girls got on the wrong train. Fortunately, everyone on the train was extremely helpful, and the woman got off the train with us at the next stop and helped us get on the train going back to Génova. She explained everything to the train conductor, as well as everyone in the train, and we ended up not having to pay. This was with her speaking not a word of English, and me miming works or mixing Spanish with the 5 words I knew in Italian.

It was worth it though, as Vernazza ended up being gorgeous and the food amazing. We gorged ourselves on pesto genovese (since Genova is so close) with pasta shaped like a twisted toothpicks, grilled mozzarella and tomato panini, lots of gelato, limoncello, and the best tiramisú I have ever had. I think I gained about 5 kilos that weekend alone.

Our trip home was almost as eventful as our trip there. We ended up in the Milan airport waiting for our flight, but accidentally wrote down the wrong time. Thinking our flight was at 3pm we got to the airport at noon with plenty of time to spare. We get up to the counter to check in, and they send us away, we are too early. We come back again in an hour, and they look at us again, and say, you are too early. We look at the flight on the screen. Our plane leaves at 5:30pm. We have over 3 hours to kill at the airport. For some reason I always end up back in Milan, my least favorite city in Europe. But the important thing is, we made it (on a plane full of annoying Italian high school students heading to Madrid for the weekend). After leaving Vernazza at 6am we arrived back in Madrid at 10pm.

Aside from being able to take a break from the smog in Madrid and breathe fresh sea air, it was also nice to visit a place where people are super friendly and with chefs who know that cooking involves more than just frying something in olive oil or cooking it to death in tons of garlic. Can't wait to go back this summer.