An Italian New Year

**Big long post that starts heavy on photos, and ends heavy on writing.**

December 31 – We all packed up and were on the bus bright and early. We drove to Pisa for lunch and had some free time to look around. I walked around by myself taking photos and looked inside the church. I didn’t go into the tower because I didn’t feel like spending the money.

Cathedral with the leaning tower in the background.

Inside the cathedral.

Nativity scene inside the cathedral. Featuring the leaning tower.

We got back on the bus and drove to La Spezia. Then we got off the bus and got on a train that was headed to Monterosso. The ride was absolutely beautiful, even though it was hard to see much. Every glimpse we managed to get was perfectly picturesque.

We got to Monterosso and had free time to look around. A couple guys decided to swim in the sea, but I just wandered around with some people. We found a little café and stopped to have a bite to eat. After eating, we just wandered around the town a little more before we had to go back to meet everyone and get on the train. When we got there, a bunch of guys had bought fire crackers to celebrate the New Year, and Angie’s boyfriend was helping set some of them off. She wasn’t too happy about it, but he didn’t stop until a police officer came by and asked him to.

View in Monterosso.

I think this is what you could consider "downtown" Monterosso.

We got on the train and headed to the next town. By the time we got there it was already dark out, so we couldn’t see much. It seemed like a really small place though, so I’m not sure how much there would have been to see anyway. After we were there for a while, we got back on the train to go to La Spezia for dinner.

The restaurant was incredibly small, and we were really packed into one room. My table was pretty cool though because we had 5 Canadians at it. Only 1 person at our table wasn’t Canadian, and there was only 1 other Canadian in the whole group that we were missing. The meal was decent, we had pasta and then chicken and chips (soon to become a theme), but kind of a weird dessert.

The town we visited after Monterosso (I don't remember its name).

We got set up in our hotel and had some free time before our Contiki party. I was tired so I decided to have a nap, and I barely woke up before we were all supposed to meet downstairs. We were in some sort of conference room and everyone had cracked out the massive amounts of alcohol that they had purchased earlier in the day to celebrate.

Then a bunch of the guys (and Angie’s boyfriend) started setting off the firecrackers on the balcony. Setting off firecrackers on New Year’s Eve is a big thing in Italy, so you could hear loads of other firecrackers being set off all around the town.

When it was getting a little closer to midnight, we set off to find a street party to celebrate the arrival of the new year. There were tons of little street parties all over town, so we found one that we liked well enough and stuck there until the countdown that wasn’t a countdown and everyone just started going around saying “Happy New Year!” Angie even gave each of us a sparkler so we could celebrate properly.

A bit past midnight, we started walking in search of another street party. There were tons of them, most with musicians playing up on a stage, and crowds of people celebrating and lighting firecrackers. The crowd following Angie thinned as people got lost along the way, but I wanted to go back to the hotel, so I just kept following her.

I went to bed pretty soon after I got back, but then I ended up having to get up to let my roommate in when she came back. Twice.

I woke myself up early the next morning so that I could count down to the same New Year celebration that my family was counting down to back at home. We got to sleep in, so I stayed in bed for a while before I finally went for some breakfast and packed up my stuff.

Effie decided that she needed to wear a special outfit for the first day of the year, so she wore her onesie. Some other things included. I suggested that she go for the 1 boot, 1 shoe look, so she did.

Effie's look for the day.

Leaving late seemed to mess everyone up. We almost left 2 guys behind when their alarms hadn’t gone off because of the new year, and one guy almost forgot his wallet. We got everything sorted out fairly quickly and then we were off. We needed something to do on the drive, so we started going through introductions where everyone had to go up to the mic and say their name, where they were from, agge, an embarrassing story, and the colour of their light (green – single, orange – it’s complicated, red – taken). We stopped for lunch at what was essentially a truck stop, and I had a big buffet meal, and since I had bought a Coke, they gave me a Coke glass with a Santa on it.

We got to Nice that afternoon and had free time until dinner. A whole bunch of people headed off to the Laundromat, so I went with them just in case they needed help translating things. It was an extremely confusing set-up for laundry (there was even some water-extractor step thing in between the washer and dryer), but we managed to figure it out with a combination of the terrible pocket translator Jag had brought (it didn’t seem to translate things very accurately), my knowledge of French, and the English-speaking owner who came through and helped us out. A man and his son came in and made the mistake of paying for their machine before they put the clothes in, so they lost their money when the washer locked up and starting washing its own empty self.

After the adventure with the laundry, we went back to the hotel to hang out for a bit before dinner. My roommate had gone on a jog and apparently ended up so far from the hotel that she was lost and had to taxi back.

That evening we decided to walk into town for our dinner. It was in the basement of a restaurant, and it was a decent meal. The food definitely seemed a lot richer and heavier than the food we had been eating in Italy.

After dinner, Angie took everyone who wanted to go out to a bar where you could dance on the tables. I was tired, so I headed back to the hotel with a large group of other people who didn’t feel like going out either, and went to bed.

Next - More of France!