Day 18- Plans

Unfortunately plans did not work out for us to visit my friend jess in Florence, but we had train plans for Italy, so at 5am we were Italy bound. The streets in Aix are unrecognizable this early in the morning; there is trash all over the streets from all of the fun the night before, a few people walking around. I am surprised they are still upright because its obvious from the glitter on their shirts and the stumble in their step that they are still up from last night.

We make it to the small train station in Aix fill in our tickets and try to find our way to our platform. It shouldn’t be to hard, there are only 2 platforms, but some how the people who made the station found a way to make this confusing. There were numbers and letters denoting the plat forms, not numbers and letters together, they were separate. It was confusing, but luckily we were early, and the station was teeny tiny, and our train was the only one there. Thank goodness, still Italy bound.

Our first two trains were nice, not many people, large comfy chairs, felt like first class compared to what trains in the US look like.

Everything was going smoothly, until we got onto our third train. It was 15 minutes late and there were two or three hundred people on the platform. When our train arrived, every one from the platform got on. Lucky us. So every squeezed on to the train like a bunch of clowns in a mini cooper. You couldn’t move, you could barely even breathe. So for a half hour we rode on the clown train having our toes stepped on, falling on people we barely knew, and smelling people who barely knew a shower.

Crowded Train to Ventimille

 Fortunately everyone on the train just wanted to go to Monaco, understandable. When I looked at the time I realized it was 30 minutes until the changing of the guards, duh, that was a crucial train, note to other travelers, never take the train that’s 30 minutes before the changing of the guards. When we got off the train we were in Italy, slightly uneventful as there wasn’t a customs station, and we didn’t get our passports stamped, but we knew we had arrived, and that’s all that mattered.

We took the scenic route to our hotel, but we arrived in one piece.

Thankfully, this hotel was much larger than our hotel in Paris, it also had a huge bathroom. Even more important than the size, it was very clean, came with shampoo, and had a free breakfast in the morning I do love free!

We quickly changed, and walked to the beach just 2 blocks away. On Fridays in Ventimille, there is a huge market. It is much different from the ones in Aix. This market had all types of clothes and knock off purses, bed linens and jewelry. We decided we needed to sit in the hot sun for a bit before we would be up for the market. So we laid on the half rock half sand beach, and passed out.

PALM TREES :)

After a few dips in the cool Mediterranean Sea and a little color on our skin we decided it was time to tackle part of the Market, a small part. We most likely walked about half a mile through the streets, but the market went on for much longer possibly for miles. Personally I got my self a 3 Euro pair of sunglasses, score!

Ventimille Beach

We sat down to a nice Italian pizza dinner and hung out in the café for a few hours, this was our vacation from our vacation.

Dinner

We wrapped up our meal and headed back to the hotel ready to hit the town. Our plan was to grab a bottle of wine the have before we went out to save some money on drinks. Well, as I said before, plans don’t always go as planned. Every single store was closed, our luck. Instead we stopped into a pizza shop and got a few beers to go. For some reason we decided to get the weirdest beer in the fridge and ended up paying the same amount we would have at the bar.

Expensive

We got all dolled up and headed to the bar that the concierge suggested. When we arrived it was dead. The concierge said something about Saturdays being better and how tonight wouldn’t be as fun, but it was hard to believe this place was even a bar. Unanimous decisions, go to bed, and have a great day tomorrow. Done.