Hey Updater

Ciao de Firenze!
Its been a while since we've updated and its because we were volunteering in Southern Italy outside of a town called Martina Franca. We used a website called Helpx to contact a host and arrange a time, date and amount of time you would be available to come and help them with simple, tedious, fun or difficult tasks around their property. It could range from anything between washing dishes, building green-house to getting the eggs from the chicken coop. Unfortunately for us, our host did not elaborate on what exactly our stay would be like. Normally a host has a house with a spare room for you with at least somewhat comfortable accommodation. Our host however, had a Trullo, which isn't that bad, but it was more like a partial Trullo with one room that was a kitchen and a partial room that had the sink and fridge. It was cute, kind of, but besides that, he had two trailers, one he slept in and one we slept in. It was kind of dirty and there were spiders everywhere. Needless to say, Kelli had a hard time, I wasn't necessarily happy either but we dealt with it. Again, that is all doable, its like camping, its fun, its an experience that we can tell our friends, family and future kids about. But here's the kicker, he didn't have any running water, or a source of water on his property, he had buckets, bathtubs, big glass containers and water jugs that he had a man come fill up every so often (with the exception of our drinking water, which we went and filled up ourselves). So again, this seems manageable, until its time to shower.. If we wanted hot water we had to boil it on the stove then run it over to his make shift 'bathroom' to ensure a comfortable shower experience. The other part of this 'bathroom' had a toilet, but it was literally only a toilet. If we had to do anything other then pee we had to take a jug of water to the toilet to "flush it down." Again, this was quite the experience. So much different than what we are normally used to, it was humbling, quite humbling, to say the least. I'm glad we did it, but I wish we would have had a heads up about what we would have been getting ourselves into.

As Koby said previously, we managed.  I might have cried to myself the first morning we were there because it was the opposite of what we both envisioned..  For example, we thought Gazy was a girl who lived in a nice house on some property that she needed help maintaining, and I also hoped she had an espresso machine so she could teach me the Italian secret to making those delicious cappuccinos. But nope, Gazy was a boy and we were way off on all of our other predictions as well.  I'm glad we volunteered and I'm glad we're done.  I would do it again if the circumstances were different, I'm just not a totally "roughin'" it type of girl.  I like having running water and being able to shave my legs.
Anyway, now we're in Florence and everything is fantastic. We tried AirBnB for the first time, it great! Our 'host' is really nice.  We've just been exploring and going to lots of the places that our friends have suggested.  We've both been quite tired though, I think our journey is finally catching up with us. We went to Pisa a couple days ago.  The tower was great! But Pisa itself is quite boring and kind of smells like poop.
After Florence, I think we're going to Venice.  We booked our Oktoberfest accommodations!  Which is camping for 4 days and 3 nights, they provide the tents, air mattresses, and a hot breakfast, so it should be fantastic! Our camping dates are September 27th-30th, so we have to figure out what we want to do with our time until then; I would like to go to Vienna and Budapest, but we have to see if we can afford it.  It may sound ridiculous, but I feel as though we haven't done much for being here for 5 weeks because we've only been to two countries, which is why I want to go to Vienna and Budapest before Oktoberfest.  Yesterday, we planned out the rest of our journey, because we'll only have 27 days left after Oktoberfest and we have a whole lot to see.  We'll be going to Poland, the Baltics, back to Germany, Amsterdam, Scotland(hopefully), London(maybe), Wales, then back to Dublin.  So it's a lot to cram in, but I really want to enjoy as many countries as possible while we're here!
Sorry my portion of the post is a little scattered, I've had about 4 shots of espresso today!