Wednesday 13th: Levanto, Cinque Terre

I woke up in the morning. I realised then that there are only two toilets in this hostel. Absurd. I had to wait for a long time. Not good.

I had my breakfast. This hostel had an included breakfast. The breakfast was really not good. The bread comes in an air tight packaging. Some people from Thailand saw that I wasn't impressed with it and they said that this is normal bread. They eat this all the time in Thailand. For some reason I couldn't explain to them why I thought this was not good. I realise now that it is just the principle that bread should be eaten as fresh as possible. Something that has been in an airtight bag for months disrupts something in my analysis of the goodness of food.

I checked out of the hostel and decided I would just walk straight to the train station. I was going to look more at the city, but I didn't want to carry all my bags around and wander through the streets.

I didn't have a ticket yet. I planned to buy one at the station. It went okay except there was a big line. There was only one person selling tickets and a couple at the front were trying to organise the most complicated ticket journey ever. The lady had to get a dusty folder from the shelf to look up some details, and then enter things online that took a while to update. It was a bit absurd. Eventually they decided to have an additional person to sell us tickets. But, I got the ticket for the time I wanted so it was okay. The ticket is to Levanto, a town above a section of Italy called Cinque Terre.

I made it Levanto! Hooray.

The train journey went okay. I had to change train once at Milano. When I got into the compartment for the new train, there was an old man in there who seemed to have a problem with his back who was trying to get his stuff down out of the rack. Eventually I helped him get it down and moved to the opposite rack. During the journey, he had to call some people on his mobile phone. He had a lot of trouble seeing the numbers on the buttons and then pushing them. Then he finally got the number entered, called it, and had it rejected because we entered a tunnel at that moment! He didn't seem to know that you can easily redial a recently called number so he went through the process again. Once, someone was calling him, and he missed the call because he couln't find his phone in his jacket. I felt sorry for the guy.

I got to Levanto. It's quite a small town I think. It looks really nice. My map to the hostel was drawn using Google Earth. I found myself having to walk across an overpass with no sidewalk with cars driving right at me. I didn't count on that when I drew the map.

I got into the hostel. When I got into my room there was one other girl in there. She is Charlene from South Africa. She is very enthusiastic and said a lot of things. After a little while in the hostel, some other people arrived. Laurent, from Montreal, Canada. Camila from Brazil. And Viri (some kind of spelling) from France. They all seem to be really nice. There was some kind of proposition thrown out that we should go to dinner together. That sounded pretty good. The lady at the reception gave us some suggestions on good places to eat in the town, so we went with one of them.

First we had a bit of a look at the sunset.

This is a park that is sort of in between some restaurants/the town, and the sea. There are lots of kids kicking a football. This is the first scene of a more authentic italian town, so I thought this was pretty cool. (although I think this is still a bit touristy, but not the same as Venice...)

Laurent and Viri. I'm just snapping random pictures.

We walked to the place we were going to eat. This is in the caravan park, but it is good food.

I got the pasta ragu. It was very good but there was not enough of it. Laurent got the same thing and he thinks this is the best pasta he has ever eaten. We were both very hungry, so afterward we ordered a mergherita pizza to share. It was not a very good pizza in my opinion.

 Over dinner we had some interesting discussions. Charlene asked Laurent what he thinks of marriage. He thinks it's unnecessary and a waste of money, among other things. Charlene feels quite strongly about the benefits of marriage, so she was having a big discussion with him about this. Then she asked me what I think, and I think the same thing as Laurent, roughly. Then she asked the two others, and they seemed to also roughly agree, although Camila thinks that marriage would be nice in the right circumstances. It was an interesting conversation because Charlene seems to have fairly extreme and far reaching position on the subject but she is also a strange, eccentric, nice person, so we challenged her extreme views a little bit and she had some (in my opinion) strange and funny justifications.

After dinner we played fussball. It was Laurent and myself against Viri and Camila. Laurent and I won! For the second game I asked if Charlene wanted to take my place but she was happy watching. We switched teams around and I think Laurent and Camila won again Viri and Myself. Then I played against Laurent on my own. Laurent won again. He has very quick reactions and a powerful shot which he puts down to the technique having some kind of similarity to ice hockey which he plays often. In the last game I was decimated. I scored just one goal.