Day 12 – Last day of school

After my four desserts yesterday and it being my last chance to do so, I thought it would be a good idea to get up early and walk the walls. So waking up at 7am, off I went. Tina had shown me pictures of a place where you can walk (for free) through tunnels in the wall, so I found that and had a look (it’s located at the northwest corner of the town inside the walls, across from Trattoria Giulio).  The passage ways through the wall are pretty cool and it was a lovely walk until I turned a corner and woke up a homeless person! Mi scuzi!! I said ‘Buongiorno’ and walked in the other direction! I found out later that Bjorn was there about 15 minutes later and there was no sleeping homeless person, so I must have scared him and he left! Sorry!

Today’s lesson was a review of congiuntivo, some practice with direct pronouns (much better than those crazy combination pronouns!) and then the final activity was a game of “Tabo”, which is the same as the English game “Taboo”. The aim of the game is to try to get your teammates to guess a word without using the words that are also listed on the card. This was really fun because we had to explain a word using our limited Italian vocabulary!

After class and lots of goodbyes, our mini group went to a trattoria for a final lunch. We had an outside table and each enjoyed a pasta dish. Afterwards, it was farewells and hugs since I had to hurry back to the apartment to pack and buy a sandwich for the journey to Perugia in the late afternoon. Tina had told me about a great place that makes sandwiches to order called Pizzicheria La Grotta, which is very close to Piazza San Michele. I had a procuitto with pesto and percorino on whole wheat (yay not white bread!!) bread, all for 4 euros. It was by far the best sandwich I’ve had in two weeks. Leave it to me to find the best sandwich place in town on my last day!

After packing up my bags, it was farewell to Laura, who had given me a keychain that was made by a group of disabled kids in the town. It’s very cute and a lovely momento of my time in Lucca. Grazie mille!

Now loaded up with my big backpack on my back and my small one in the front, it was over to Lucca’s train station to catch the regional train to Florence with a change to another regional train to Perugia. Regional trains don’t have reservations, so when it comes to seating, it’s first come, first serve. That was fine on the first train, since Lucca’s the second stop on the route. When I arrived in Florence 20 minutes late and without the number of my second train (crap!!), I had to rush to a sign board to try to find which route Perugia is on, find the track number and then run to the train. I jumped on board to find it pretty much full so had to walk through about eight carriages before I found a seat. Because I had rushed, I wasn’t even sure if I was on the right train but I was able to ask someone (in Italian) if the train stopped at Perugia. He ‘thought’ so, so I stayed on. It wasn’t until an hour into the journey that a conductor checked my ticket and didn’t say anything, so I assumed I was on the right one!

Arriving in Perugia in the dark, with only my ‘google map’ instructions to go by, I saw that there were two different stops for the bus I wanted. I took a guess and jumped on the one heading to Piazza Italia, which I could not find on google maps on my phone. Lucky for me it was the right one, and after 20 minutes, I found my stop and arrived at the Hotel Iris a few minutes later. Seeing the big double bed, five pillows on the bed and my own bathroom, I thought  was in heaven!