Finally back home after an awesome week!  Sunday my friend Ray and I left for Belgium and after a bus, a metro, another bus, a plane, another bus, 2 more trains, and a tram we finally arrived in Gent!  We met up with Xavier at the train station and he showed us to our hostel and then we went out for a traditional Belgian meal.  Consisted of bicky burgers and belgian fries.  The fries lived up to their reputation (they're amazing) but the bicky burgers were a little strange.  Here's the deal.  The burgers are the pride of Belgium but  nobody is allowed to know the recipe for what's in the patty.  So it's basically mystery meat.  And if you're caught filling someone in on the recipe or if you try to recreate it, you go to jail.  I only ate one...
The next day we rented bikes and rode all over the city.  It's a really beautiful city with tons of old buildings and churches.  In fact, there was a castle right across the street from our hostel!  We explored a few of the churches, stopped at every single chocolate shop, ate Belgian waffles and Belgian hot chocolate for lunch, and tried as many Belgian beers as we could.  That night another friend from Marseille met us there and continued the rest of the trip with us.

We spent one more full day in Gent riding around on bikes and then early Wednesday morning, we left for Italy!  We left at about 6 in the morning and got to Florence at around 2:30 that afternoon.  Italy is so nice!  We found our hostel and just walked around the city a bit, then found a nice restaurant to go have our first Italian meal.  It was really really good.  We actually ran into a couple other friends from school before dinner, then after dinner ran into even more.  What are the chances?  
The next day we toured around the city all day.  We took a free walking tour through the hostel which was pretty interesting, we went into Il Duomo, saw Ponte Vecchio, and saw the Statue of David!  All pretty amazing stuff.  That evening we hopped on another train and headed to Rome.
After about a 4 hour train ride we had arrived and were all really excited to be there.  We had originally not booked a hostel for that night, thinking we could just take an overnight train and sleep on the train right?  Well our plan didn't work out as it was 9 o'clock and we were already there.  So we went to the hostel that we had booked for the next night, assuming we could stay there.  Full.  Checked two other hostels, full.  Finally we were walking to a third when an Indian guy walks up to us and asks if we were looking for a hostel.  Well.... yes, yes we are actually!  He promised us a private room for three, bathroom, and breakfast in the morning included all for 17 euros each.  A little bit sketchy but we decided to go along with it and see what it was all about.  We follow this guy to a Western Union/internet cafe where he goes in and finds another guy.  We follow the two of them down to the very end of this street and then they stop at this unmarked residential building.  No hostel signs anywhere!  We follow them upstairs and he has about 4 rooms on one of the floors and tells us this is his hostel.  To make a long story short, we stayed there.  Interesting night...
The next day we saw all of Rome.  We literally walked everywhere!  Saw the Coliseum, the ruins, countless churches, the Trevi fountain, the Vatican, the pantheon, and tons more.  It was really awesome.  To be honest, I liked Florence more as it was just a nicer looking city, but it was really cool seeing all of these sights in Rome.  This was our last day in Italy and the next day we flew back to Marseille.
All in all, it was an amazing trip, the three of us had a lot of fun.  It is good to be back here though.  Been pretty busy this week with tons and tons of school work, but now its the weekend so I have a little bit of time to relax.  Look for pictures on Facebook soon, i'm going to try to put some up today.