Cinque Terre

So now that finals have begun clearly I should have no time left to travel....right?!? Well turns out my first final is not until this Friday. So after spending the weekend and Monday doing as much studying and paper writing as possible I decided it was time for a break. So I checked the weather and saw that it was foretasted to be a beautiful day in Cinque Terre on Tuesday so I decided to make a "quick" day trip.

Quick is a relative term as the train ride is about three and a half hours each way. Lucky for me that gave me a decent amount of time to study and edit papers even more (you can never quite escape studying during finals). So early tuesday morning (6:27) I was on the first train out to Cinque Terre.

I will say that it was a great choice. It was perfectly sunny all day long, between 70-75 degrees, and a nice breeze off of the Ocean. Cinque Terre is five towns strung along the western coast of Italy, it is unique because the towns are sandwiched between Mountains on the one side and the Ocean on the other. In between all of the towns there are walking paths so you can go from one town to another all on foot. To do the whole walk takes about 3-5 hours if you do it straight. As one might expect the Italian beaches, food, vino, and other distractions slow you down a bit! I will not say too much more about my trip as I think the pictures tell the story of the day best!

Path along the cliffs

Town of Manarola

Swimming Cove

Making my way to Corniglia

Town of Corniglia

Corniglia and Manarola from above

Coast line in Vernazza

Ocean...amazing

Coastline and the town of Montorosso in the distance (btw...I want that boat!)

As you can probably tell (if you can't get your eyes checked) it was absolutely beautiful! Only drawback is the insane number of tourists. I probably heard 10x more English and even German then I did Italian throughout the day (quite a difference from Bologna where it is only Italian). Still despite the high tourist population it was more than worth the trip, my only regret was not having more than a day to spend there.