Pisa, Lucca and Genoa

Today I am in La Spieza which is a gateway town to the Cinque Terre. This basically translates into 5 towns and is meant to be some the best coastal views in the world and some great hiking, I will find out more tomorrow when I go there but it was always one of the things I was most looking forward to about the Italy part of the trip. The hostel is dead, its just me and 2 girls here it seems ;-) Anyway, since my last entry the pace of the trip has quickened and this is actually by 4th stop in 5 days so it is getting a bit more rushed now. I'm glad I had the slower start to ease me into things though. My last update was on Saturday night and I'd intended to pack my stuff for the following day and get an early night after that, however the 2 Brazilan girls who were in my room had other ideas and several bottles of wine later I was in a club in Florence and have most likely ended up with travelling companions as I will be meeting them in either Venice or Zagreb. They say the best nights are unplanned and when you are travelling every night is unplanned so I guess thats why I love to do it! The next day, hungover, I headed for Pisa and the leaning tower, except that is Pisa and I instantly thought why the hell have I booked 2 nights here? I let my sore head heal in the sun on the beautiful gardens by the tower and spent the evening wandering around the area by the Arno which was nice. I decided on a day trip to nearby Lucca the next day which is a small town still enclosed within city walls and about 700 meters each way. It's a cracking little place and filled with world heritage quality buildings and I strolled around aimlessly taking it all in and enjoying the sunshine. The beer was flowing again later as those Aussies emereged and multipled from nowhere again but there was no club this time which may have been for the best. I did quite like Pisa in a way, it was a lively student town again with some great universities I found out. The weird thing is I only went there in the first place to view an archiological project that went rather wrong, still it was fun. Yesterday and today has been mainly focusing on a rather roundabout way to get here which looking at it now could have been planned better. I spent a night in a hostel in Genoa, which was way out the way of the city so I was resticted to just being in the hostel with a load of erasmus students whatever they are! :-S Today after a variety of trains and buses I am here and looking forward to doing something interesting tomorrow after a few days of relativly little. Just to recap then I've 2 nights here, then its Bologna and then Venice after that we're onto Croatia. Hello to all xx