A day in Siena
Trip Start
Jun 05, 2006
1
15
33
Trip End
Aug 01, 2006
Siena,
Italy
Saturday, June 24, 2006
=Our group + pikachu, jenn, robert - jill
. We took our food and some wine to the Piazza della Signoria outside the Ufizzi, where there was a jazz concert going on. It was just great.Anyway, we got up early this morning and hopped on a train to Siena. Once there, the hostelworld.com directions promised that our hostel would be a mere 10 min walk from the train station, so we just decided to hike it. We didn't have a good map, but based on the one in the train station, we should have taken a right out of the station and our first left would have practically taken us straight to the hostel. We went right and then Jon and Jill expressed doubts about the look of the road, and thought we should head back the other way. So I asked a lady who was picking some berries by the roadside. And from my knowledge of Spanish and hand motions I decided she was pointing us back the way we had come, fitting with what the others thought. So, OK, we headed back to the train station and headed in the opposite direction. Soon we came to a fork in the road, and headed left--the one that sloped down. After another 10 minutes we came to a restaurant where we consulted another map. It seemed we were just a few blocks away. What we couldn't tell from the map was that this was almost straight up, as Siena is a maze of roads and old rock walls lying atop a high hill. We asked for directions from another half dozen people, including an old lady whose groceries Jon and I carried up this stone staircase
An old wall from ~13th C
. We would see her again making slow progress down the street with her four bags, stopping every few yards to rest, after we had already headed up the block, made a wrong turn and gotten more directions from an old man who spoke some broken English. When we finally made it to our hostel, having hiked with our full packs for well over an hour up and down some very hilly terrain, our host watched as we traced our path on a map he provided us and just laughed and laughed and laughed. If we had taken the first left where we had seen the first woman picking berries, and headed up the hill, it would have been a 10 minute walk, just like we had originally thought. Which brings me to the conclusion that that lady hated me. I think it was because I might have smelled a little bit after the sweaty train ride from Florence. Who would have thought Europeans would have such high standards of hygiene.Well, the place we are staying at is this really nice old house, with pictures of flowers, creaky wooden staircases, a nice sitting room with sofas and a long table with a white knit tablecloth, and a backyard with shade trees and lawn furniture...quite a change from the dingy, noisy youth hostels we have become so accustomed to. Well, at least it is only one night...Im sure our place in Rome will have lots of jackhammers and noisy bars right outside, like we re used to.
Ciao,
Matt
