Saturday
Early on Saturday morning we got up and went to the train station to catch our train to Assisi. We bought our tickets, met up with the boys and caught the train. On the train ride over I slept and read and chatted with everybody. Once we got to Assisi we had to catch a bus from the train station up to the old medieval town on the top of this big hill. The buses were packed and two of us actually got pushed out because everybody was pushing and shoving their way on. So Rosin and I ended up taking a different bus (much nicer, with very few people). Once we got off the bus and met back up with the rest of the group only to discover that the road we had to take to get to our hotel was all uphill for at least a mile. An exhausting hike up to our hotel and when we finally get there they told us we couldn't check in yet. So we left our bags there and wandered around the property for an hour. The area had a hotel, a youth hostel, a campground, and several bunkhouses on it, along with a kids playing area and several miniature donkey pastures. We went to the kids area first and played on a spinning wheel thing and the slides first before going off to go find the miniature donkeys. I loved this whole area because it smelled strongly of pine trees, which remind me a lot of home. When we found the donkey pasture we found a momma donkey with her little albino donkey baby. Most adorable thing I've ever seen. Then we saw a dog that looked almost identical to Brandy (my dog at home for those of you who don't know) and I petted her for a long time before we finally went to lunch. Lunch at the hotel was decent and cheap, which is always a relief. After lunch we decided to go explore Assisi. We walked back into town and decided to go see the fortress castle at the top of the hilltop first. That was amazing. The climb up there was beautiful, but that's when my camera battery died and I had no way of charging it all weekend. :( We walked up to the castle and then wandered around inside. It was a really old and cool medieval castle. We wandered around all the tunnels and towers before we ended up sitting on this wall at the top of it that overlooked the entire surrounding area of Assisi and all of the region beyond. Absolutely gorgeous. That was my favorite part of the entire weekend. It was drizzling rain a little bit, but it was just so peaceful and beautiful that a couple of us stayed up there for a long time just talking about life. After the castle we went down into the town and explored all the churches there. The churches were all very old and beautiful. My favorite was la Chiesa di San Francesco. The church itself is part of a franciscan monastery and it has two basilicas on two different floors along with the tomb of St. Frances beneath. The painting inside were all gorgeously done medieval art and the entire church was just fantastic to see inside and the multiple floors made it especially cool. After we finished wandering around the town we walked back up to our hotel to check in. That was an interesting experience. Because there were 10 of us, the only place they had for us to stay was this tiny bunkhouse in the middle of the property. We walked in and there are 12 bunk beds with no pillows or blankets and no heating system. None of us knew it was going to be like this so none of us came prepared. We ended up having to ask the hotel for blankets and luckily they were able to lend us enough military style sleeping bags for everyone. Then we decide to go check out the bathrooms on the property and of course they have zero toilet paper and soap, most of lights don't work on the bathrooms and there are bugs everywhere. We were truly camping. After we finally settled in we went back to the hotel restaurant for dinner. I had the most delicious hot chocolate there. It was essentially like drinking a cup of melted chocolate bar. Amazing. Then we ended up going back to our bunkhouse and played Mafia and drank wine until late into the night. I fell asleep long before everybody else and apparently they kept yelling my name to wake me up but I was so out cold that I didn't hear them. I did wake up in the middle of the night though, completely terrified, having no idea where I was and believing that I had no idea where everyone else was. It took me a good 10 minutes to figure out I was still sleeping in the same room as everybody else and that nothing bad had happened. Totally weird.
Well that was a long one and it was just one day so I'll stop for now and write the rest tomorrow.
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