The Amalfi Coast!

I am sad to say that this past weekend was my last major travel weekend! But it was such a great one!! On Thursday  Franchesca, Michelle, Jesse, and I headed to the Amalfi Coast! We were supposed to go with a student run program called Florence for Fun, but they canceled on us last Monday so we quickly decided to put the trip together ourselves. We took a 3 hour train to Naples and then a sketchy hour metro from Naples to Sorrento. I was very glad we were with our guy friend Jesse for that part of the trip. When we finally got to Sorrento we checked into our AWESOME hostel!! It had a bar downstairs, a sun deck and the rooms were so nice! The only problem was we were staying in a room with a girl that had a stick up her ass (pardon my french) and couldn't stand the music at the bar downstairs and turned the heat up to 90 degrees (no joke) every night.
The first day we had a lazy day where we explored Sorrento, ate delicious pizza, and layed on the beach and got our tan on. The weather was BEAUTIFUL. For dinner we went to the coolest restaurant that our hostel told us about, that had only Italians in it. It was so cool to see that since we haven't been to too many places that aren't overpowered with Americans in Florence.

Sorrento

On Saturday we took an all day boat tour to the Island of Capri. The person that owned the boat was friends with the guy who ran the Hostel so we got the trip for half price and the other 8 people on the boat tour were from our hostel. We met the cutest New Zealand boy ever :) I decided that him and Kai would be best friends because he had the biggest spice for life like Kai does. He was so much fun to have on our boat tour because he got everyone enthusiastic about everything and everyone became friends because of him.

Michelle and me with our New Zealand friend

I'm on a boat.

Love

Our boat!

We first headed to the Island of Capri on this tour and got to hang out there for a couple of hours. It was beautiful but unfortunately it was raining while we were on the Island, but when we got back on the boat  it was sunny out again! We ventured around the Island on our little boat. Let me just tell you this is a huge accomplishment for me because I have this weird irrational fear of open water in the ocean (even though I was a swimmer my whole life.) But I accomplished my fear because this is what the semester is about. I even got in the 45 degree water. This was not a wise decision.
4 people from our group decided to get in the water and I was debating it. Francesca looked around and goes, Look at all of the jellyfish in the water, oh my god!! So I asked the guy, do those jellyfish sting a lot of people and looked at me and just says "Yes" but I was in the mood to be adventurous and while Francesca was getting nervous, I just decided to jump off of the boat. I hadn't felt the water with my feet or anything and as soon as I jumped in the breath got knocked out of me because of the freezing water. But I decided to swim a couple minutes to where I could get up onto a rock to walk up to a cave. I swam there and tried to get up, it was a lot harder than I thought and I couldn't use my strength considering I couldn't breath, so I had to swim back to the boat without seeing the cave. But hey, I went swimming with Jellyfish in Capri, pretty cool.

Capri

Freezing water!!

That night we went to the best restaurant ever! The cutest old Italian man picked us up in his macchina, aka car, and drove us to the restaurant. The people were very excited to have us because it was far away from the center of town so no tourists ever come there. They talked to us about California and what we were doing in Sorrento. Then they gave us there homemade bread with their orange and lemon infused homemade olive oil and their homemade wine to go along with it. We got fried mozzerella and rosemary roles and fried anchioves for our appetizer. He gave his homemade passionfruit and papaya sorbet before our main course. We ate seafood for dinner, and he gave us his homemade special desserts afterwards! Followed by his homemade digestive alcohol. It was everything people think of when they think of an Italian meal. The nicest people, with the best homemade food and wine, and tons and tons of it.

Sunday we headed to Pompei on our way back to Naples. It was so cool seeing such an ancient city preserved so well. If anyone gets the chance to see Pompei I highly recommend it because it was just a really interesting place that is hard to even put into words.

I am sad that my major traveling is over, but I am SOOOOOOO excited to see my family on Saturday and Kai again in 3 weeks! I can't believe I only have 28 days left abroad!!!