Yup, It Leans

In lieu of midterms creeping up on us, we decided to stick close to home this weekend. However, we also decided we were all going a bit stir crazy, what with all the studying, so we planned a day trip to Pisa.

Pisa is located in Tuscany, close to Florence. Had we been thinking, we would have gone to Pisa when we went to Florence earlier in the semester. Alas, we did not. Hence, our trip this weekend.

We put Kelsey in charge of finding a train to our destination. Apparently she woke up at 4:30, rousted Erica and planned on waking me, to catch a 6:30 train. But there were some doubts about being able to get a ticket at that hour of the day. So they all went back to bed, I continued sleeping, and we awoke at a more reasonable hour (8:30) and caught a train at 10.

4 hours later, we arrived at our destination. I was a good little student, and did some reading and studying on the train. Yeah for midterms...not.

We walked out of the train station hoping to see the tour right away. However, those crafty city planners had us walk through a shopping district to get there. As a result, I am now the proud owner of two nifty Italian scarves. One green and paisley (obviously) and the other orange and red with a smaller paisley print. I love them both.

When we finally finished weaving our way through the town we saw the tower. The consensus, the tower does indeed lean. We took the requisite tacky pictures propping up the tower, took a few videos (to be posted soon), and even got kicked off the lawn by the po-po (I feel like this effort is in vain, tourists constantly storm the lawn).

Pisa is a super cute town. It is very tiny, and pretty much all that is there is the train station and the leaning tower. We did get some cool pictures though. Erica is in a photography class and needed some portraits. So I ended up posing in front of an old door. It felt a little like senior pictures. But I enjoyed it, and she got some awesome shots.

After pictures we were all quite hungry, so we decided to grab dinner before we hopped on the train. Dinner, was, well, an interesting experience. Erica was hit on by the server, Vittorio, for the whole evening. Even did some tacky magic tricks for us. It was very odd, but provided some good laughs. Italian men are huge flirts, the guide books are right.

Then we boarded the train, and spent the next four hours rehashing our day and attempting to get some sleep.

A quick trip, but a fun trip. (And a shorter post, just for you Mrs. S!)