wowzers

Ciao peeps!

I'm in Malta now. With my parents. It's sweeeeeeeet!

But prior to that I have a week of catching up to do!

So I left Venice last Friday to go to Florence. Unfortunately my week with Jordan in northern Italy had come to an end but it had been great fun and we have so many stories together now. So he ventured south to Rome while I had a stop before I hit up Rome (for the second time this year), Florence!!
Basically I loved Florence, such a beautiful city. When I arrived I found my youth hostel pretty quickly and got to skype my brother which was great! I was using the interwebs for a bit and suddenly this guy and a girl came up to me and asked if I wanted to go out with them that night. Out loud I said "yeh that'd be great" but in my head I was like "OH MY GOSH I don't have to spend the night by myself!!!" I love it when that happens. I think it's certainly the big man upstairs doing that kind of thing for me :)

So me, an American girl, Polish guy and a French guy went out that night. It was good fun, that night I also got to meet up with my roomie Lucy which was cool but was very short. At least we can say that we met up in Florence now.
The next day I spent in the city. I saw some really awesome things like human statues, great guitarists, real statues, but the most amazing thing I saw was the statue of David in a museum. The wait was totally worth it. It is just so massive! And so perfect, I think I'm beginning to find myself really appreciating good art now as I find myself in awe of some of these museums and spending 4 hours in them at the least.
That night I got some food and went up to a lookout of the whole city and saw the sun set. Again, it was just beautiful. Would seriously recommend it to anyone, as well as the hostel I stayed in because around the corner was a gelato place that had 2 euros for the best flavours including blueberry, blackberry, biscuit, and nutella. Turned out that the nutella 'flavour' was actually nutella. I cannot express enough the magnitude of joy I had in purchasing this gelato.

So that was Florence! Next was Rome, when I arrived it was very strange because I had actually already been only a few months ago. This time it was a lot busier. I stayed in a bit of a dodgy hostel but there were cool people there so that always makes it better. That night I got to meet up with Jordan again which was cool, we caught up for a bit in front of the Colosseum and then something disturbing happened. We got hit on by a 40+ year old Slovakian dude called John who although knew little English he was still able to express his feelings for both 'boys and girls'.
I gag every time I think of those terrible few minutes.

Now Monday, today I would finally visit the Vatican city. It was pretty great. Again, a lot of people but great. I actually went into the Vatican museum, spent a good part of the day there. Oh and the best feeling was remembering that I had pre-booked my ticket so I could straight past the lines of people that would wait for hours, and enter immediately.
The museum was great, I got to go into the Sistine Chapel and everything. It was a bit of a weird feeling because I felt the same as I did about the Lourve because I knew it was great art, and I did learn a lot about it. But somehow it was more the sheer quantity of this great art that amazed me. Anyway maybe that's just me.

Sorry this is a bit long but I'm almost done! After the Vatican I walked around Rome a bit more and finally left to the airport as the next day I would fly out (hopefully with no problems) and see my parents in Malta!!
Yeh umm turns out my whole 'no problem' attitude would not come true at all. To say it simply my ticket had some problem which meant I didn't have a seat on the plane forcing me to spend over double of the initial price to get a seat, and then there was a 5 hour delay on the plane actually arriving. Fun fun fun! Not as bad as the bunch of people I met in the airport that night who had been stuck there for 4 nights already.

So now I'm in Malta, got to see my parents last night, it was sooo great! When they arrived I had dinner and a bottle of wine ready for us to start our week long catch up. Immediately it felt like we were back at home again and we have to continually remind each other that we are in Malta haha. Today we went into Valetta (the capital), had a tour of the city in a horse carriage and got to have my first beer with Dad.

Top day, top week, top holidays, top life pretty much.
Will be writing again before I go to Sicily. I'm tired, Hamish and Andy time and then sleep.

Night night :)
Curtis.