Beach Day

I was surprised at how quickly I fell in love with Cinque Terre, Italy. It began with seeing these flowers right when I got off the train.

By the way, the train had a layover in this building, where Ale and I will meet Brenna in a couple days!

 

Cinque Terre

The name "cinque terre" translates into English as "five lands." It is a small area off the Northwest coast of Italy and it includes 5 little towns. We are staying in Monterosso for 3 nights.

My new favorite flower!

Home For Now  

This is our apartment! The woman who rents it out is an American who came to Italy 4 or 5 years ago to visit a friend from college. While here, she met her boyfriend and then she eventually moved here and has been here ever since. 

I'll spare you the details, but basically it's a miracle that we get to stay here because some other plans fell through. It is so cute!

This is a little loft! Don't worry, we fully plan on having a tea party there tomorrow.

Food
I am sick. Heavy sinuses, tender throat; watery, itchy, swollen eyes. Pretty sure it's just allergies but I've never had them this bad. It's annoying, but I'm safe and happy and in Italy so it's not stopping me from doing anything!

Ale brought me breakfast in bed this morning. Nutella and bread. Classic Europe if you ask me. Sadly, we will not be keeping the Tasmanian Devil cup (unless someone requests that we bring it back).

Another classic European sight is this:

Tables set out by the street, owner standing by the door to greet people (aka talk people into eating there), menus in multiple languages. Restaurant like this are everywhere.

 I ordered a pizza with four toppings from this restaurant, and this is what I got:

Separated toppings?! It was way good, except for the olives that still had huge pits in them.

 Ale ordered pesto lasagna and this is how it looked:

It tasted much better than it looks, but I thought it was interesting how it was made.

Beach
The person from whom we're renting the apartment manages a private beach (well...her Italian boyfriend does and she helps). We spent a lot of time there today! It was nice for me because I wasn't feeling so great, and it was nice for Ale because she did a ton of reading and tanning.

View from our beach chairs.

I can't get over how much I love street performers!

 

 

There were lots of men trying to sell sunglasses, and ladies trying to sell massages.

 

A woman discovered a dead jellyfish in the water and pushed it onto the shore with a stick and it ended up right by our beach chairs. I poked it with a rock and it was not jelly-like at all! It was very hard and stiff.

Maybe it's something else, but we think it's a jellyfish.

It was small, but lots of people stopped to look at it. We had prime seats for people-watching AND dead-jellyfish-watching.

After looking at it for a while, I think she got scared.

 We got new bracelets. High five!

 

I took this picture to see what my hair looked like, and I kinda liked it. So...there you go.

Gorgeous, right? Right. Tomorrow we hope to visit other cities in Cinque Terre!

Ciao and Loch Sloy!