Cinque Terre: Riomaggiore, Manarola, Corneglia, Vernazza, Monterossa

I am way behind on this whole blogging situation, so here's what I'm going to do.  I will do a different blog for each place we've stayed in the last week abd a half.  Hopefully I won't ramble too too much.  So here's Cinque Terre:

On the first day there, after settling into our hostel, we walked about 20 minutes over to the first town, Riomaggiore.  

The next day, we hiked up the mountain, above Corneglia (the third village) and on to Vernazza (the fourth village).  It was all so incredibly beautiful.  The sunlight was golden and the vegetation was vibrant in its thousand shades of green.  The steep hills descended into the shimmering, turquoise sea and the towns sat quietly atop the rocky cliffs.  That night, while we were eating pesto lasagna and pizza maragherita, we started chatting with another guest of the hostel.  His name was Alex, and here's the crazy part: it turned out that he was from Nelson!  We are so far away from home to find out we were at the same hostel as a fellow Nelsonite.  What a small world:)  That night he showed took us to a lookout where we watched the sun set over the Ligurian Sea.  Needless to say, it was stunning.  

The following day we took the train to Vernazza, and then hiked about three hours from there to  Monterossa (the fifth village).  On the way there, we bought some lemonade from a lady who was selling it beside the path.  She was cutting and squeezing fresh lemons and then just adding sugar and water to the concentrated juice.  It was sooo refreshing! Once we got to Monterosso, we wandered around for awhile. Annalea asked directions in Italian from a man who turned out to be a Russian tourist, not an Italian info personnel.  It was really funny to watch, for myself, and his friends as well.  We continued to wander and then went to the beach to lay in the sun, and to dunk in the refreshing water.  On the train ride back to our hostel, we stopped off at Corneglia, since we skipped it the day before.  We literally walked ten minutes into the town and then had to walk back again in order to catch the train.  Since it was our last night in Cinque Terre, we went out for dinner.  We shared a seafood salad, consisting of mussels, squid, octopus, and shrimp, and then had Tagliolini with Lobster.  It was all very delicious.  

The next day, we left on a train to La Spezia and then headed from there to Florence.