Italy that I didn't expect to see

by Bohdana Lytvyniuk (Ukraine)

A leap into the unknown Italy

Nothing boded ill. My sister and I were sitting at the airport waiting for our flight to the city of “fashion”. And then, suddenly, before boarding, my sister decided to check WhatsApp and unexpectedly, at the last minute, the guy from Couchsurfing refused to shelter us for the night. And we are sitting on the plane and thinking, “Well, what shall we do now?” ⠀ Tip 1: if you decide to find a place to stay using Couchsurfing - have a backup! ⠀ I had such backup, so I wrote to the person 2 minutes before departure. Fortunately, he agreed to pick us up. We saw his answer already upon arrival. Therefore, all this time I was nervous on the plane and scrolled through all the possible options in my head. Here we are at the airport. Ticket from airport to the city center of Milan costs 8€. I can please you with the fact that with Bergamo a ticket costs 5 €. ⠀ We arrived at the center, standing at the train station, where there were a lot of homeless people and suspicious people and we were trying to catch Wi-Fi in order to arrange meeting with this kind person, but it can't be so simple ... he said that he can only arrive in an hour. We are “happy” because at that time it was already 00:00 on the clock. ⠀ In the end, we got to him at 2 in the night, since he lived outside the city, we slept for 3 hours and went to Florence. Day 2. Florence ⠀ We arrived at Florence at 12 in the afternoon and decided to find the hotel that we had previously found on Booking.com on the road. ⠀ We got to him an hour, before we went to check others, spent 3 hours on them and realized that life in Italy is quite expensive. ⠀ Tip 2: book your hotel in advance ! ⠀ We were happy when we found this chic two-star “Hotel Aida”, which looked better than some 3 and 4 star hotels. A huge plus is the breakfast we really ate. ⠀ Tip 3: if you haven’t got enough sleep, and went off the road, it’s unlikely that the world will seem beautiful to you. Especially in the rain. Since my friend thought that there were probably not enough “bright” moments for us, she decided to add more ... We come to the station, showed the ticket to the driver, and he said to us, “Sorry, you have a ticket for another date”. No, Florence is certainly beautiful, but not to the extent that you stay for another day. ⠀ I am beginning to persuade the driver to put us even on the floor, to throw them in the trunk, I can’t let a tear go down and, with God's help, he leads us into the salon and we drive 4 hours with a hare. So we are in Rome. The local helped us find the metro, told how and where to get and said goodbye to us. From this moment, the apogee of our troubles began .⠀ At 7 o’clock in the evening we decided to find an overnight stay. It was about 20 minutes to go, after which my sister and I were in the center and started asking the locals how to get to the first hotel on our list. It took an hour of time. An interesting Italian feature, the location of hotels in the "entrance" to enter them, you need to click on the "intercom", on which the name of the hotel was written. In small print, on a small button, on a small square. Everything would be fine if it weren’t 22:00, we wouldn’t hang around the central station area at such a late hour, where homeless people feel good, black people smoke grass and we, 2 girls who came to Europe ⠀ What we just did not see this night. I remember her as a nightmare and understand how lucky I was in life. ⠀ Of all my travels, this journey will be remembered by me for life. Italy gave me a huge amount of experience and memories.