Auf Wiedersehen Berlin, Buongiorno Italy

This morning we were all a little anxious about missing our flight, so even though we didn’t need to leave until 10:30, we were up and moving around by 7:30. We made sure everything was packed, we got a breakfast of yogurt, strawberries, and a croissant from the grocery store, and we looked up which buses we needed to take to get to the airport. For the last time we left Die Fabrik Hostel with our bags and waved goodbye to the ladies who made us breakfast every morning for three weeks in a row and the last few days we had in Berlin. We hauled all of our things on to the train and transferred to a bus to get to the airport. We actually arrived early and waited for the baggage checking for our flight to start. Once we had our bags checked we found some food and sat and ate the hardest, driest, seediest turkey sesame sandwhich I have ever consumed. But, it was food and we didn’t know when we would be having dinner. We went back to our gate to wait for the plane, and eventually they announced that the plane would be delayed by twenty minutes. So, we waited a bit longer and eventually made it on to our cramped plane that would be flying us to Pisa, Italy.

The flight was really quite uneventful, there wasn’t even bad turbulence. I spent the plane ride reading and taking a short nap. The flight was only an hour and forty minutes in totality, so we didn’t have to amuse ourselves for too long. Once we landed we got our bags from the luggage pickup then bought tickets for the bus that goes directly to the train station. We got to the train station by the bus, then we picked up our tickets for the train ride from Pisa Central to La Spezia Centrale, where we would then transfer to another train that would take us to Corniglia. We were doing great until the transfer at La Spezia. We didn’t know beforehand, but there are two stops on the train for La Spezia, and we got off at the wrong one. Fortunately we weren’t the only ones to make the same error and we overheard them being told that there would be another train in a few minutes that we should jump on to get off at the next stop, which was the right station. We made our transfer with plenty of time to spare, despite our mishap with the train stops. The train was mostly tunnels through the Cliffside, but every once in a while we got a glimpse of the brilliant blue waters.

We got off at Corniglia and gawked at the Mediterranean Sea then walked up the stairs to the bus that would take us into the town. We got off at the town square and asked the nearest person we could find where “Bar Matteo” was because the host for our Airbnb decided to leave the keys in a bar for us instead of meeting us in the village as he had previously said he would. We found the bar, and the owner handed us the keys and then asked us if we knew where we were going, which we didn’t. He told me something along the lines of apartment 220, so I took the keys and left. Ten minutes later of wandering around, hauling our luggage up and down stairs in the high humidity I decided I had better go back and ask the bar person again how to get to our apartment. The bar owner was kind enough to call our host for me and got the address for the place. The bar owner was then able to point us in the right direction.

Once we found the door to our apartment we had a hell of a time opening the door because there were two locks and a pull string. The first lock turned three times, and the second lock turned two times and the pull string didn’t seem to do much. We finally figured out that once you had all the locks unlocked, you had to pull the string and that released the final bar to open the door. At last we had made it in, and we piled in the tiny stairwell to climb to our rooms. We quickly discovered there was no WiFi, which was inconvenient since we hadn’t figured out how to get back to the Pisa airport, checked into our next flight, or figured out how to get from the airport in Paris to our next Airbnb. After we had gotten our things situated, we went back out to town center to find something to eat. It was about 8:30, so we didn’t have many options, so we chose Café Matteo (which we discovered was the same as the bar Matteo). I got the Gnocchi ragu, which was quite delicious, but the portions were not very large for the 9 euro I spent on it. With food in our stomachs and access to Wi-Fi from the Café, I messaged everyone I needed to to let them know I was alive, checked my email, then sent our host a message asking if he could meet us the next day to bring us a wireless router. He said we could meet at 9:30pm the next day, which meant we would be able to take care of the business we needed to for our next leg of the trip. With our stomachs (mostly) full and some valuable Wi-Fi time achieved, we went back to our apartment and collapsed after a long day of traveling.