This past weekend I took a trip to Capri, Positano, Sorrento and Pompeii. It was unbelievable. I did the trip through a company that takes care of the all the traveling and a place to stay. On Thursday night I left on the bus at 7:30pm with a few of my roommates and we arrived in Sorrento around 2:3am. That time included a few stops so total it was about a 6 hour bus ride. That night everyone went straight to bed because we were so tired. Friday morning I went to Capri for the day. It was roughly a 30 min ferry ride. Once I got there I took a tour by boat of the island which was really cool. The weather was pretty cloudy and sometimes rainy on Friday but Capri was still gorgeous! The boat ride was about 1.5 hrs and it stopped to give people a chance to go into the blue grotto. The blue grotto is a small cave that is basically really blue from the reflection of the light on the water. It is supposed to be gorgeous (I didn't go in). When you get to the area of the blue grotto lots of small boats are waiting and can only take 4 people in at a time. It is a really small opening so you have to duck down in the boat so the boat can fit through. The tour was awesome and a great way to see the island!(and I didn't get sea sick! What a plus)

After the boat tour we walked up to a higher part of the island to get lunch and walk around for a bit. Then we took a bus up to Anacapri which is a part of the island that is the highest. The roads were pretty windy and narrow because the island is so steep. On the island there was a place to get handmade custom sandals which Capri is known for. The man there fit them exactly to your foot and you could get any color or style you wanted. Basically you could choose everything about the shoe. They were generally 100 euro ($150) or more so I decided against it. A little too expensive for me! After I was finished I headed to the bottom of the island. In order to get there I had to climb down stairs. The stairs took at least 45 minutes without any breaks. There were tons of them! They were pretty steep too. I was definitely tired when I got to the bottom! After the afternoon I headed back on the ferry to the hostel. The hostel I stayed at was gorgeous, much better than most hostels. It was just built in June. I was in a room with 12 people (all who came on my bus for the trip) although most of the rooms were for 10. There was a really pretty roof terrace, a restaurant and a bar. One funny thing we noticed was that there were a few snails crawling up the walls.(Check out my picture!) It was about an inch or 2 inches big and it was just there on the wall. It was pretty funny because it was so random! Since it was raining Friday night I stayed at the hostel and had dinner there because there was a restaurant. The rest of the night I just spent time with people on the same trip and enjoyed the roof terrace with the great view.

Saturday I woke up and the group went to Positano, a city about 30 minutes away on the coast. It was unbelievable!! It was perfect weather on Saturday so the coast was gorgeous. We spent the day at the beach relaxing. Instead of sand the beach had a lot of rocks, small and large. The water was perfectly clear and really blue plus it was the perfect temperature. I would say without a doubt it was the most beautiful place I have ever seen. On the beach there was a place to rent motor boats so 3 groups of us went on the boats. The boats were 10 euro a person (8 people per boat) for 1 hour. We went to an area to go cliff jumping (I didn't end up doing it). A lot of the people did do it and it was pretty cool. After the boat we went to eat lunch at a restaurant right on the beach which was gorgeous. After our day at the beach we took a ferry back to the hostel and went out to dinner. Since dinner is much later in Italy we went around 10 and finished around 12:15am! After that we headed back and went to bed.

The next morning we checked out of the hostel and drove about 45 minutes to Pompeii. Pompeii was awesome. I took a 2 hour tour of the city. It was a bit long but pretty interesting. There was a lot to see. After the tour we headed back to Florence. We left around 5 and got back around 11:30.

Overall I had a great weekend! Everywhere I went was gorgeous and I really enjoyed it. I hope I get the chance to go back to Capri again!The group I did the trip through was great and the people on the trip were awesome.

My next trip is this weekend with my study abroad program. I will be going to Cinque Terre and Genova on Saturday and Sunday. On Friday the school is offering a free trip to a vineyard for free wine tasting which should also be a lot of fun!

I am also in the process of deciding where to go on my fall break. I get a week off from school so it is a great time to try and travel. So far my choices are #1 spend the week on a trip to Greece, #2 travel with friends to France, Ireland and London or #3 go to a big food festival in northern italy and then meet up with friends and go to Ireland and France. It's a tough decision to make but I definitely am happy to even have these opportunities. I can't believe I have already been here for 3 weeks, it is passing by so fast!

One more random fact I noticed about Florence: The street numbers do not go in order here. There are red numbers and there are black/blue numbers. Apparently one color i for building that used to be houses/apartments and the other color was for restaurants, stores etc. Each color goes in order (all the reds are in numerical order and all the black/blue are in numerical order) but they are mixed together and often random making it very confusing to find addresses. So when you see an address from italy and the number looks like 6/r it means its a red number.

Thats all for now. Hope everyone is doing well and I'll write again soon!