Well the time had come for me to travel down to Santa Margherita Ligure and meet up with the gang for the wedding of the year.
I left my hotel in Milan and headed for the train station. As I mentioned in the previous blog, the hotel I was staying in was fairly basic and did not include breakfast, so I decided to grab something at the train station. Surprisingly, it was raining, as I took the short walk to the station. As soon as I arrived at the station, I was set upon by several opportunists, trying to sell me an umbrella or a hat. There was literally hundreds of them, at every turn outside and inside the train station. Where do they all come from, they just appear selling umbrellas when its raining and then just appear selling sunglasses when its sunny. I did chuckle at one guy, he was Asian and he had decided to make a family day of it, by selling umbrellas with his wife and kid in tow, the kid must have been about 2 and was in a pram. Nice to see a family business doing so well!!!!
Anyway I had a late breakfast whilst waiting for my train. To be fair I was sick of having croissants at this point so I had a slice of pizza for breakfast, nice!!!!
The train arrived and I hopped on, this train was different to the previous ones as it had compartments with six seats per compartment. The train journey took approximately 2.5 hours and I arrived in Santa Margherita Ligure at about 2:30pm. The hotel was a short walk, downhill, from the train station. I checked in and my room was awesome, it was a four star hotel and the bathroom was amazing. The shower was a double shower the whole length of the bathroom and it had a huge sliding glass door to get in. The shower heads were huge stainless steel square contraptions. Half of the wall next to the bed was a huge frosted window looking into the bathroom showers, very nice indeed. The room also had a mini-bar. However, this mini-bar consisted of a wine rack which contained 35cl bottles of red wine from 2004 that cost £45 a bottle!!!! Lets just say I stayed well away. lol
Anyway after I got sorted I went out to explore. Santa Margherita Ligure was stunning. It is a lovely beach town, quite small but beautiful. It was a complete contrast to the hustle and bustle of the big cities like Milan, Rome and Paris. This is what I call 'real' Italy. A lot of the buildings were old, traditional and very authentic. Everything had a kind of 'rustic' feel to it, it was wonderful. As I walked along the beach and the sea front, the sun blazing down, munching an Italian Ice-cream, I thought to myself 'this is great' The views around the bay were stunning, with the waves crashing on the rocks and the houses and buildings sparsely located on the surrounding hills. Its safe to say that this was another place that I fell in love with straight away.
I returned to my room and got ready for the evening. Quite a few of the wedding gang were meeting up for a meal and a few drinks before the wedding tomorrow. A mini-bus picked a few of us up from the hotel and took us further down the coast to a place called Paraggi, were we met up with the rest of the gang and had champagne on the beach. It was fantastic. We then had a lovely three course meal in a very 'posh' restaurant, it was delicious. After the meal everybody just mingled drinking wine and catching up. It was a real pleasant evening. Eventually, the mini-buses took us all back to our various hotels, and that was that.
Tomorrow at 4pm, Andy and Lilith will be getting married. Lets hope it all goes well, I thought as I fell into a deep sleep.
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