Saturday, June 9, 2007

Montecatini Terme

We arrived in Montecatini shortly before 8:00 and had just enough time to drop our bags in our rooms before heading back down to our dinner, where we were first greeted to the hotel with a welcome reception. Again, the dinner was a preset meal with salad, pasta, meet (pork tonight) and dessert. The food was once again very good and the tiramisu was out of this world. I actually didn’t think I had room for it, but it looked delicious and I ended up clearing my plate. Every single place we have eaten has been extremely accommodating with the meal. I am a vegetarian, as are some of the other people in the group, and they have all made an effort to either give us a separate helping of pasta or fix another meal for the second course, which is usually a plain omelet.

It was pretty late after dinner, but the night was cool and beautiful (it had rained earlier in the day) and almost everyone went out to walk around the town and work off some of the meal. The word Terme means spa in Italian and Montecatini is a spa town that was founded by the Romans in the second century. It is a quaint town with lots of shops and cafes. The first thing I noticed when getting off the bus was the smell of flowers, which we think was honeysuckle. It smelled absolutely wonderful and fresh in comparison to the city smells of Rome.

Our hotel in Montecatini was the Grand Hotel Nizza e Suisse, which was a quant hotel in the center of Montecatini. The rooms had a cozy feel to them with two twin beds, a small desk area, and a bathroom. I stayed in a triple so we also had a day bed tucked away perpendicular to the two twin beds. The bathroom in this hotel was my absolute favorite. Our room had dark blue, light blue and yellow tile in the bathroom and the design looked like it could have come out of a magazine. The bathroom again contained a sink, toilet and bidet. What made our room different that some of the others, was that we actually had a shower. I heard from some of the other people in the group that they only had a tub, which we also had. The tub did not have a curtain or anything around it and did not have a shower head up on the wall. Instead, there was a shower head connected to a host that was connected to the faucet down where the tub and the wall meet. One last note about the bathroom, is that in both hotels, the towels have been enormous. I was expecting small towels like what we get a lot of times in U.S. hotels, but the towels so far have been more like bath sheets!

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