Right now it’s Saturday morning, since I was too tired to bother writing anything coherent when I got back to my apartment.
So anyway, yesterday I woke up later than I wanted to, but before 10, so it wasn’t a complete failure. Anyway, I got dressed and, after finding that I accidentally closed out of my Firefox window of all the Pisa information, spent 20 minutes finding it again. I wanted to print out some of the Google Maps directions, so I met up with Chloe and walked over to the FUA building, but it was closed since it was Saturday. We decided just to wing it and go anyway without the directions, so we headed over to the train station. Tickets to Pisa are pretty cheap: only 5.80 euros!
After arriving in Pisa, we looked at the big map of the city outside. It’s not actually that big of a place. We picked a pretty straightforward way to get to the tower, and headed off. Along the way we came across a tourist center, so we grabbed a map, but we probably would have been fine without it, since we just followed one road most of the way and there were signs showing the direction to it every now and then. After about a 15 minute walk, we arrived at the Leaning Tower of Pisa! After taking the cliche “holding up the tower” photo, as silly as I think it is, since it’s a requirement if one visits Pisa, we walked around and looked in the souvenir shops along the road. I couldn’t help but notice that everyone was doing the same thing that we did: they were all posing and “holding up” the tower. of course I wasn’t at the right angle that the camera would need to be at, so it was quite funny looking at all these tourists holding their hands up and looking pretty goofy. Now I know how the native Italians must see us when we pose for pictures in front of stuff they see every day and just consider part of their town. After that, we had lunch at a nearby restaurant. I got tortelini in a cream sauce with ham. The food was excellent- the service, not as much. We asked for the check, and it took us more than 10 minutes to get it, which was absurd because there were only a handful of people there. This was partially due to the fact that our waitress decided to sit down inside with sandwich and a cigarette and talk with some customer for 5 minutes.
After eating lunch and walking back to where we started, we found the bus stop and took a bus to Marina di Pisa. It was gorgeous there. It was all giant rocks, sort of like a jetty going out into the Mediterranean Sea. After finding a bathroom to change into my bathing suit, Chloe and I climbed up onto the rocks and walked around until finding a place to sit. The fact that this was a stone, and not a sand, beach made putting down a towel sort of a waste of time, so we just dropped our stuff in a crevice and jumped into the water. Since it was already 4pm, the water wasn’t that cold anymore, which was nice. I’m glad I brought sandals though, because in order to walk to the deeper sections of water, one had to step over underwater moss-covered rocks, which were quite slippery. Nonetheless, we made it out, and swam around a bit. I felt like it was easier to float in this water than back home in the Great South Bay. Maybe the salt content of the Mediterranean Sea is higher than there- I certainly thought so when I accidentally got a mouthful of water! After floating around for two hours or so and swimming out of the jetty into the actual open sea part (but not too far out- the waves got worse pretty quickly) to see what it was like, we headed back to land and dried off. From there, we grabbed a gelato while we waited for the bus. I saw a flavor called “melaverde” (green apple), which I had never seen before, so I tried it and it was delicious, as well as very sour! Then, the bus came, we bought train tickets at the station, and headed home.
The return trip took a littleless than an hour, and we got home before it was even completely dark. Since chloe’s blisters were bothering her, we just ate at her place rather than go out. We cut up some garlic and onions, and threw them into some tomato sauce she had in the fridge. Then, I decided to add some milk to the mixture, since we didn’t have much sauce. With a little parmesean cheese on top, it actually turned out pretty good! Huzzah for improvized cooking!
Today (Sunday) looks like it will probably be a doing-work day, since I don’t really have any other plans. Maybe I’ll try to get some more work done for Prof. Smaldone’s class, since we need to do a timeline of all the stuff we’ve seen and journals about visiting museums of said stuff, so I’ll probably do that now.