Day 14

Day 14 was another travelling day.

We finished packing last minute things and headed out for Ravenna.

The drive took about 3 hours and I read and dozed for most of it (the heat here saps a lot of your energy). Near the end I was feeling a bit down so I put on Abbey Road and it cheered me right up.

Our hotel in Ravenna is decidedly the nicest so far. The rooms are quite small, with a king and a single bed, but they are comfortably so and are meant mostly to sleep and change in, most of the time is to be spent at the beach. Our hotel comes with a private section of beach and each room gets two beach chairs and an umbrella. The sun here dwarfs the other cities’. It is unbelievably hot here, like, 5 minutes walking down the street and I sweat through my shirt. The beach is very nice, but somewhat crowded in the day. We learned fast that Ravenna, and the entire seaside really, is where the Italians come to get a vacation from the tourists so there is very little English here, at least compared to Florence and especially Rome. We also learned that there are only a few restaurants. I went out for lunch with a group for pasta and afterwards hit the grocery store for snacks, drinks and the makings for sandwiches for later. One of the drinks I grabbed I thought was orange juice but was actually an orange/carrot/lemon mix which sounded disgusting but tasted really good and I drank the whole litre in one night (200% of my daily recommended dose of vitamin C), so all of you that bugged me to be healthier, that was for you. I also learned that the only place in the entire town to get internet is a crappy pc in a café that sounds like a typewriter and costs 6 euros an hour! Communication will therefore be sporadic and short I am afraid. I spent most of the rest of my afternoon on the beach. At 7 we were invited to the weekly welcome party where there was music, food and drinks and most people ate a little too much and were too full to eat much of dinner. Dinner was penne and veal with salad, fruit, vegetable and desert buffets. After dinner I did my reading for class on the beach which was much quieter in the night.

I came back to the room and finished my reading to the sound of the Macarena coming from the patio party. There was some commotion around curfew when the teachers found that some girls had snuck a few older Italian guys into their room (they are being dealt with presently. The girls, I mean, the guys are long gone). Besides that it was a nice, quiet night.