Sorrento & Capri...and the scary journey home

OK
So I had an amazing weekend! beth and I felt completely independent for traveling in italy on our own! we took a train from florence to naples no problem, then took a smaller local train from naples to sorrento...slightly creepy but totally ok because it was daylight and lots of other tourists and such. we were just kinda freaked out because we were reading beth's trusty rick steve's guide to italy and he described how dangerous the train that we were riding actually is! pretty silly. (we had pretty much planned the whole weekend with this book, and he did a pretty good job of giving helpful hints and such.)
we got to sorrento on friday and found our lovely little bed and breakfast! our room was all blue and had a little balcony that looked over the street. sorrento was so pretty! it is on the coast of the Mediterranean (bay of naples) but it was much calmer and we didnt feel as touristy.

apparently sorrento is a big vacation spot for british people, so we kinda blended in better. we wandered around sorrento all day friday and friday evening we went to find a restaurant up on this high cliff overlooking the city. we had a beautiful view and an amazing meal! we even splurged and had an italian style meal with two courses...i had homemade pasta with shrimp and zucchini then grilled swordfish!!! it was soooo good!!

that night we also found the foreigners club, which was this great place that completely was catered to well, foreigners, but mostly british middle aged people! haha Let me just, this was everything i could expect and so much more. they had "live music", which was these two italian guys -one with a guitar and the other standing behind a keyboard and would press one button to play the pre-recorded songs that are like programmed into the keyboard. hilarious. so we just hung out there for a bit, watching slightly drunk middle-aged british people dance the night away, then went home. we were the youngest ones there by at least 20 years. it was like we were at a british wedding reception. my favorite person was a cute little bald man who we named "hips" because that is all he liked to do when he was dancing! wow good times.

saturday morning we took a ferry to capri. WOW! i want to live there for the rest of my life! it is this tiny little island off the coast of sorrento that has these massive cliffs and it is sooo pretty! it was pretty touristy but i loved it!

we wanted to find the blue grotto...so we took the local bus up the mountainous roads (literally clinging to the edges of cliffs) and then another bus once we were up there down to the other side of the island to the blue grotto. apparently we were really doing it local style because we were the only ones who spoke english the entire day! it was still pretty fun though. we finally made it to the stop and everyone got out so we figured we were going to be able to find the blue grotto. there were just a few little pathways along the cliffs and random restaurants scattered but none of which were busy. i found a random lady at a table and asked in my best italian if she spoke english and much to my surprise she simply said NO. so i again tried in my best italian to ask her where the blue grotto was. she eventually understood me and pointed us toward another little path. we went down and finally came to a small stone stairway with a littel gift shop thingy at the top. we looked down and saw a handful of italians taking pictures and such. so we went down and figured out there it was! the entrance to the blue grotto!
but sadly the water was way too choppy to go in, and we wouldnt be able to see inside it that day! (thats what all the italians were yelling at us, because i guess they thought we were crazy americans who were going to risk our lives and jump in the huge waves crashing against the massive rocks) so we took many pictures then headed back down to capri again. we had some lunch and got some souvineirs then took a ferry back to sorrento and from sorrento a ferry back to naples.

OK here is the BAD part of the weekend, but just so you know I am safe and sound and nothing bad happened and I AM OK NOW! haha

ok so we had to find the train station and we were at the marina. we asked a lady in a store how to get there and she told us to take tram 1 to the station and showed us where to catch it. we uneasily went to where she told us and it was little tiny trip of sidewalk in between two crazy lanes of traffic. Naples is this dirty, crazy, busy, crime-ridden city, apparently the home of pizza, but i would never want to go back to that horrible place. some creepy guys nearby heard us say train and as soon as this one bus pulled up he said yes! train! so we jumped on the crowded bus. now when i say crowded i mean, several smelly italians all around us and we could hardly move. a family of gypsies came out of nowhere and was pressed against us on the bus. there were 2 baby buggies with babies, some little kids with accordians and then some men and women. i was kinda nervous but figured we were jsut going to ride it for a few minutes until we got to the train station. well we were standing there and all of a sudden i felt something behind me. i truned and looked to see a man unzipping my backpack!! i jerked my backpack aroudn to my front, re-zipped it, and glared at him. luckily he did not get anything out because i caught him so fast and as soon as i turned the backpack around he just got off at the next stop. i was really freaked out and pretty shaky. I AM OK AND HE DID NOT GET ANYTHING. all of my important stuff was in my purse anyway, which i was clinging on to for dear life. beth and i were basically just kinda freaking out temporarily and trying not to let anyone know we were freaking out. at the moment i was VERY scared and fighting back tears, so we just jumped off the first time we heard the word train. but we got off and walked into this small station which wasnt the one we were looking for. but nice train man told us the central station was only a five minute walk. so we walked down the street and found the central staion and along the way while i was trying to not cry and freak out we passed on the dirty streets a pet store of sorts that had hundreds of birds caged along the sidewalk on the left of us and to the right was group of men gathered outside a knife and gun store. at this point i really just wanted to run as fast as possible to the station. we made it into the station after navigating around construction and battling crazy traffic and found the departure board. we were looking and looking and didnt see a firenze stop. so again, we went to the info station and i asked, and our train was actually an overnight train that ended up in MUNICH! haha so i was like great, no sleep for us, because i didnt want to miss the florence stop! so we made it safely on our train car which was very harry potter-esque except dirty and scary. there were two other young guys in the car, both spoke italian and no english. one spoke spanish and the other dutch, so i could somewhat communicate with the spanish one. we figured out their names and ages and the dutch one tried his best to use what little english he knew. we had fun trying to communicate to the non-english speaking guys in our car with our little italian dictionaries. several times our train would just stop for like 20 minutes. we just thought it was normal or whatever but one time we were stopped for over 40 minutes. we were supposed to arrive in florence at 12 and around then i looked up and saw we were in rome!! our train had been 2 hours delayed!! so when we finally made it into florence it was around 2 a.m. and we werent at the station we were familiar with so we just got a taxi back to our apartment!
so needless to say it was an eventful journey home...but we made it finally ! and everything is fine! but the first half of the weekend was great! i loved it and took so many pretty pictures! the journey back just sucked! i have decided that the following two pictures basically sum up the entire weekend:

And that was my eventful weekend!!

CIAO!!