Back in Japan

Italy was beautiful! We'll definitely make a trip back there in the future. The 2 1/2 week vacation was a perfect amount of time too--relaxation, site seeing, and just doing whatever we felt like doing. And it was so wonderful hearing Italian spoken all around us! "Grazie..prego..arrivederci..ciao!" I was very surprised how much I understood (much more than I had thought I would with only one semester of Italian in college). All in all the trip surpassed both of our expectations and so did much of where we went in Italy :) I'll write some more details in the coming week, and include some additional pictures for commenting.

In the meantime, both of us are pretty tired from just getting back. It's almost 8 am Italy time and we've both gotten very little sleep. It's over 18 hours of traveling for us...45 minute taxi ride to airport, 2 hour from Rome to Munich, 2 hour layover, and 12 from Munich to Tokyo, and a 1.5 hour train ride home). We're trying to stay awake at least 4 to 5 hours longer so our sleep schedule isn't too messed up :)

So the pictures... :) We spent four nights in Venice, seven nights in a small town in the Tuscany region, and six nights in Rome. Instead of posting pictures straight on this blog, I uploaded video picture-slides to youtube.

Here are the links to the video-slides: **UPDATE (7/28/08)..these videos have recently been set to "private"

Venice: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPfoXUEltoA
Tuscany: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dtcBYa5vElg
Rome: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FF3b8bmtIg