In which we go to Bergamo, and by Bergamo I mean Lovere

Our final day in Italy contained much traveling, this we knew would happen to some extent, but none of us predicted the ridiculous day that would have us finally end up at our hostel for the night. We left our hotel in Milan sometime mid-morning after packing and having breakfast, made our way to the train station, and bought tickets to Bergamo. We didn't realize until after we bought them, however, that we actually had to leave from a different station, so luckily we hadn't discarded our Metro passes, and just used them to hop over to where we needed to be. The train we took to Bergamo was about the most run down one I've ever been on; half the windows were covered with graffiti and all the seats had stains on them. It worked, though, and got us to Bergamo around midday. From the station, we attempted to follow the instructions given to us by the hostel on how to find it. They were as follows:

Just opposite [the Bergamo train station], from the bus platform, take the bus to the Iseo Lake and after a 30 minutes trip get off in Lovere just in front of the hostel.

For a start, this hostel advertised itself very trickily as being in Lovere, Bergamo, Italy, making Lovere sound like a suburb of the city. I can now tell you, it is not. Secondly, since when does "30 minutes trip" mean a ride of over an hour, not even counting the nearly two hours we spent waiting for the bus to come? Yes, Lovere is not a suburb of Bergamo, as we discovered; it is, in fact, a small town way back in the mountains. How did this get a 100% rating for location on the website? We were asking ourselves the same question. Upon finally arriving after, I must admit, a very pretty ride up through the foothills, we quickly disabused ourselves of the notion that we would be able to return and see a bit of Bergamo before nightfall, and contented ourselves with searching for and eventually finding our lying cheating hostel. We were pleasantly surprised at this point to discover that the hostel was really quite nice, and, more surprising still, it was completely empty save for us. The guy at the front desk was really helpful, too, and when we told him we had to leave fairly early the next morning, he said he would prepare the breakfast a little earlier than usual so we could have some.

Seeing as Bergamo was now out of the question, after dropping off our things we contented ourselves with going out for a walk to see Lovere, with the vague idea in mind of eventually finding somewhere to have dinner. Yes, our traveling literally took long enough that it was nearly time for dinner by the time we reached our destination. At any rate, we may at first have been very confused as to the location rating the hostel got, but if they were rating the actual place and not its proximity to Bergamo, it was actually spot on. Lovere is a beautiful little town, and I wish I could go back and spend some real time there. We walked along the waterfront back and forth several times trying to waste time until we could reasonably expect a restaurant to be open for dinner, as it was Sunday and next to nothing was open. The waterfront is gorgeous, and the whole place is just the right mix of cute Italian town and beautiful lake/mountain scenery. Unfortunately, it was too dark and too foggy to get any really good pictures of the views, but I assure you, they were very pretty. Here's an idea of what it was like:


Anyway, like I said, we walked up and down several times looking at restaurant menus and conjecturing as to how long we thought it would be before they would start serving food, and we finally ended up going into what advertised itself as a restaurant that was on a boat, standing awkwardly a few feet inside for about half a minute, then walking back up to shore, stopping briefly to stretch our calves on the ramp leading from the shore to the boat (don't ask). We rejected the place because there was no kitchen evident, and nobody sitting in there had anything that wasn't liquid in front of them. We then decided we'd go instead to a place we had inspected earlier, which conveniently had all their menu items listed in Italian, French, English, and German. We thought we'd give it a little more time to be late enough, though, and so in the meantime found a small café and enjoyed some gelato and espresso. Once enough time had elapsed, we headed over to the place we'd found, and enjoyed a real, delicious Italian dinner, just taking our time, talking and laughing about our ridiculous but fun trip. After dinner we went back to the hostel and pretended to be nuns with our pillowcases, stretched, journaled, and Sterling and Nicole had a bunk bed ladder duel. And after that we went to bed.


The next morning we got up much too early for my taste, so as to be sure of catching the bus back to Bergamo and having enough time to get to the airport. Breakfast was all set out for us, and was really very good for a hostel. Too bad we didn't have time for much more than grabbing some bread/pastries and a hot drink of some sort before sortiring and going to the bus stop. We had a brief stress-out while waiting when Sophie thought she'd left her boarding pass in the room, but luckily she found it in her pocket shortly before the bus came. The bus ride back was long, again, but still pretty despite the fact that it was raining this time. Once back in Bergamo, we caught the shuttle from the train station to the airport and got there in plenty of time, and so spent our time waiting by eating biscotti, going through pictures, and finishing up our journals. We had a fine flight back, and were glad, in a way, to find out how much we missed Nantes from the sense of homecoming we felt when we got back. It's good to know that we've been able to make Nantes into "home" for the time we are here, and I know now that I will definitely miss it once I'm back.