Happy Australia Day!!

Haha, today is Australia's independence day and I happen to be in the company of 4 aussie girls so it feels like it's my Independence day. The plan is to go to an Australian pub to celebrate later.

The next two weeks are going to be so much fun. Carnival was amazing and I can't believe that it's just starting. Last night was so much fun. We met a group of 12 guys from Notre Dame that were staying at our hostel last night and we all ate dinner and hung out until it was time to be out on the town. We all had our masks on (even the guys) and we had bags of confetti that we were throwing all over the place as we were walking down the street. At first, we just walked to this piazza down by the Grand Canal and stood in the square and drank wine from a little bar kiosk thing. After we had enough piazza, Mimo, the guy who owns the hostel, walked us back to this supermarket which aparently had a discotech on top of it - naturally. The discotech was great, we danced a lot and had a really great time until early in the morning.

Today has been a pretty boring day. I woke up relatively early and had our nice breakfast (which consisted of crunchy toast cracker things LOADED with nutella) and some tea. We walked to the supermarket (yes, the same one with the discotech on top) to get some lunch for the train which ended up taking us an hour (because we wanted fresh ham from the butcher man and they also had russian salad so I had to get that). Since it took us so long to figure this out, we missed our train, of course, so we went back to the hostel and ate our train lunch in the hostel and said bye to all of our little friends. We walked down to the train station, and literally onto the train as it is pulling away, almost missing our second one.

After we had been sitting there for about an hour, the woman came to take our tickets and reservation... except, we didn't have a reservation because our little book had told us that it was a free train and not one we needed a reservation for. Well, guess we messed that up. All of the train people were talking to eachother to figure out what to do with us and finally they just let us pay them for a reservation and we were fine.

The train ride was GORGEOUS. We drove pas the southern part of the Italian Alps the whole time. They were so big and huge and looked like they just came up out of nowhere. It was so beautiful!! And all the snow was amazing. I can't wait to get to Switzerland.

I haven't decided if I am going to go to Lugano tomorrow or the next day, but hopefully it will be clear :) It's been nice so far!!

XOXO