Sorrento

On Monday morning we were greeted by Franco with our breakfast, which consisted of croissants and coffee. I'm not a huge fan of coffee but I really liked the coffee we had in Rome. After breakfast we walked a half an hour to  the train station where we grabbed the train to Naples. From Naples we had to switch to another train that would take us to Sorrento. The train was definitely an interesting experience. We were all a little nervous about it because we heard pick pocketing was a problem and that Naples is known to be a violent city. We got all the way to Sorrento without any problems, however, and with only one incident of a fight that broke out on our train to Naples.

When we arrived in Sorrento we began the search for our hostel, which was really easy to find but hard to get to when you are dragging luggage behind you on narrow walk ways. I was very pleased with our hostel; it was so beautiful and could have definitely passed as a resort. It was hands down the nicest hostel we gad stayed in on our trip! Once we got settled in we gathered up our swimming suits and sunblock and hit the beach. We struggled a little at first getting to the beach because the bus we got on was going the opposite direction. We didn't realize this until about five minutes in so we then had to get off the bus and wait another ten minutes for the next bus. When we finally got to the beach we paid to enter but was told by a lifeguard that we couldn't have a spot on the sand unless we paid for an umbrella. His English wasn't the best so we had a difficult time understanding him. When we finally decided to go back and pay for an umbrella the guy told us that he would give us a closed umbrella and then continued to say something about all umbrellas being reserved. Needless to say we were very frustrated so we finally just walked away, bought our umbrella, and had another lifeguard open it up for us. Although the first half an hour at the beach was really stressful the rest of our time there was great!

Around six we went back to our hostel, ate dinner there, and then went out for gelato, which we faithfully ate every night in Italy. when we came back we sat out on our terrace and played some games with a group of other people we met from all over the world.

Tuesday was the day of our cooking lessons. I went with Chandler and Andrea and we had a blast! We were picked up by a very nice gentleman who drove us to the resort where the cooking lessons were. the chefs were so nice and we met a bunch of really cool people from Canada, Norway, Australia, and London. We learned how to make mini pizza, ravioli, fish fillets, and tiramisu. At the end of the lessons we all sat down and ate what we had made together. We had some great conversations with everyone there as well. After our cooking lesson we said our goodbyes and the same gentleman drove us back to our hostel. In the afternoon we laid out on our terrace for a couple of hours and talked. After we were nice and burnt we cleaned up and walked to downtown Sorrento, which was super fun! There was so much to do there and we just loved the whole atmosphere of the place. Before heading back se stopped for some gelato again, not wanting to break our streak of five nights in a row. When we got back we watched the sun set on our terrace and then watched the world cup before going to bed.