Cinque Terre is on the upper west coast of Italy. As the name says, it's made up of five towns. The towns cheerfully hug the cliff face above the water in their pastel pallets. There is a trail that runs between the towns, and you can hike in the cool ocean breeze, stopping for fresh seafood or just a light croissant at any of the towns you pass through.
Despite the beauty that was hitting me in the face, my weekend in Cinque Terre was a lesson in patience. The trails were closed due to landslides, it poured during our full day there, our hostel was at the top of 365 stairs, and I was sick.
But!
The fact that joyful experiences still found us, despite setbacks, proves the power of the beauty that was around us.
A lot of smiles came from the trains: when everyone gasped and then sighed together and we transitioned from one tunnel to another, with a glimpse of ocean cliff in between, or when we got on the wrong train, only to find that everyone else did too. The train we got on didn't stop at the five towns, but took us 30 minutes inland. Once we arrived, everyone in the train sprinted together through the station to catch the leaving train back to Cinque Terre. Americans, Britons, Germans, Italians, Frenchmen, we all came together as we illegally hopped the train back (no time to buy a ticket!) We were friends for a few moments.
We got seafood every night, and poked around the villages by day. The shop owners were so friendly, and I enjoyed getting to use my "umpo" Italian to ask them questions about their families and lives. I'm sure it gets annoying for them, but I loved wandering through small alleyways, looking at people's cliffside gardens and laundry lines that flapped over the Mediterranean ocean. It was nice to know that while it was a tourist spot, it was still hospitable enough for people to live there, and that noisy Americans hadn't driven all the locals away.
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