Saturday, June 14, 2008

Siena, Italy - Day 5

Day 5 was in Siena. We went to Siena mostly because Teresa's sister Laura is studying there this summer. We only spent about a day there total but it was still worth the visit just to see Il Campo!

The funniest thing happened to me on the bus ride from Rome to Siena though. Many know I mumble from time to time but today it must have been particulalry bad. I asked an American tourist waiting for the same bus it he was waiting for the bus to Siena (to be sure we were at the right place). His answer? "English" This bus ride also included an Itallian girl next to us watching movies on her Vista laptop, a girl in front of us on her MacBook writing a paper and using bluetooh + her cell phone to browse the Internet and one of the American women on the bus reading from a Kindle. Cool.

Anyway, getting to Siena was about a 2 hour bus ride. We wanted to take the 8:30 bus but with a broken alarm clock we woke up at 8:30 instead. The next bus was at 10:30 and we made that one. We just had to hop on the North-South metro line for €1 each and ride it a few stops to the other train station in Rome, Tiburtina. The bus station was around the corner.

Once we got to Siena, a medieval hilltop town between Rome and Florence, we walked to our B&B. The owner was really nice and very helpful. It made us regret getting an apartment in Rome that had no one there to recommend things. After getting settled we walked a few blocks to check out Il Campo and wait for Laura to get out of class. While waiting, I climbed to the top of the tower (If there is something to climb, I want to do it) and we had yet more gelato.



Once Laura arrived, we headed off to the dumo there. It was pretty neat. There were marble heads of all the Popes lining the tops of the walls. There was also a library room that had a ton of books with old music written in them. This was before the modern way of writing music (which Laura said was ~1700s if I remember correctly). It was similar but not the same. It was all blocks. Laura said she had a class where they had to translate that to the modern way. Interesting!

After the church, we had dinner with Laura on Il Campo. It was pretty expensive but it had a great view.

The rest of the day we just walked around and rested. We also found out that we only had $300 left in our checking account thanks to a goof. Fortunately that has since been corrected.

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