Back to 1983 for a day

My day without modern technology wasn't going to be too difficult, seeing as I had already completely disconnected myself from my daily life... I was in Italy.

We woke up to the beautiful city of Venice that morning. We were going to be traveling to Florence and Siena that day, so after eating our hotel breakfast, we were all packed up and on a two hour train ride to Florence. I had my phone in case of an emergency, but unless I wanted to come home to angry parents and an enormous cell phone bill, I was prohibited from using it. There were never available televisions, but even if there were, we were always too busy to even care about our lack of TV entertainment. As easy as it was to go without most technology, we were traveling a lot that day, so this particular train ride was a quiet one without my iPod. To pass the time I ended up taking a much-needed nap, and I spent a while staring out the window as we rode through the hills of Tuscany.

We finally arrived in Florence, and after leaving our bags at a bag-check room in the train station, we walked to the Duomo, where Dominic then let us go do what we wanted. A group of friends and I decided to check out the inside of the Duomo, a cathedral with an extremely tall and intricately painted dome at the top. We decided that we wanted to hike the 467 steps to the top where we would be able to overlook all of Florence, but first we needed lunch. We went to a cute little restaurant where most of us ordered sandwiches. I had prosciutto and buffalo mozzarella on crunchy Italian bread. After powering up we were ready to begin our trek. By the time we got to the top we were extremely exhausted and a little freaked out, but the view was breathtaking. After spending some time at the top we decided to head back down for some gelato and a little bit of souvenir shopping. But soon it was time to leave for Siena.

After getting our bags from the train station we walked to the bus station where we began our one hour ride to Siena. Yet another hour spent traveling without use of my ipod. Once we arrived in Siena we checked into our hotel and went out for pizza. Our evening in Siena was then spent wandering around for a little bit, and playing bananagrams in the hotel.

Overall my no-technology day in Italy was a success. Although, there was one thing I used willingly and would do it again if I could, and that was my digital camera.