Pisa

So before you all even ask, of course I took the cliche leaning tower pictures. It was so much fun, and way more difficult than we expected. We slept in Saturday morning after exhausting ourselves between acing our finals and partying oh so hard at Nick's house Friday night and got off to a leisurely start. Jill, Jen, Morgan and I took the train to Pisa which was about an hour and ten minutes and set off to see the town. We had heard you don't need to devote more than about 4 or 5 hours there, but we wanted to find that out for ourselves. The walk from the train station to the tower was a straight-shot up one street, but it was full of shops and pastereccias so we stopped in a few and looked around.

We turned the corner of the street and then right in front of us, through some apartments, was the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Again, like the Colosseum, it was so weird how people literally live next door. It leans only 5 degrees, which is about 15 feet...but it really looked like it was a lot! The field of miracles, which surrounds the Duomo, Baptistry and Bell tower, was significantly smaller than I expected. Regardless, it was still fun to just hangout there and take tons of pictures. The weather was in the mid 60's (yay finally!) and we refused to wear our coats. Can't have all our pictures from Italy bundled up with coats and scarves now, can we?? While on the subject of pictures, I think I found another calling in life: photographing people in funny poses in front of the leaning tower of pisa. I got down, literally laying in the grass, and took pictures of all the girls because I got so good at making it look like they were literally touching the tower. Needless to say I was down there for a while, and strangers kept coming up to me and asking me to take pictures of them! Too funny.

So there were touristy things to walk around and see, bought a few funny souvenirs for some people (is it you?!) and enjoyed just walking around. It was a very clean city, the streets were wider than Florence's and it just felt like a very upbeat and happy city. They too have an Arno (river) and with the weather being so perfect, we took tons of pictures. It was so clear the buildings were reflecting in the water, I don't know if you realize how dirty the Arno gets sometimes when the rain stirs it all up.

On our way back we tried to stop at a Rick Steve's recommended pizzeria (our goal is to try pizza in all of the cities we go to) called Galileo, because he studied and taught at the University of Pisa, but it was closed. We were already close to the train station and didn't find any other places that looked too good, so we hopped on the train and came back to Florence.

Went out for pizza at the pizzeria everyone had been talking about which is conveniently located literally across the street from our apartment. It was so good! I got (they're personal pizzas) mushroom, tomato, sausage, artichoke and mozzarella. Everyone keeps asking, yes the pizza here is different. It's much thinner and they do personal pizzas more often than big ones. They don't leave you with the greasy tummy feeling American pizzas do. I really like the pizza here, but sometimes I do crave a nice greasy slice of Alfonso's pizza. mmmm.

So we came back and were exhausted. Plopped down on our beds and were excited to look at all of our pictures. It was a great day, we had lots of fun and can now cross another great city off our list. Next weekend we have another Rutgers excursion in Tuscany (San Gimignano and Sienna). We've officially been here for a MONTH, ah! It's going at the perfect pace though, fast enough to not feel homesick, but slow enough to feel like we have time to get to do everything we want to. Monday starts our "real" classes, so I'll let you know how that goes. No more getting up at 7 and fighting for showers with 10 girls at a time, yay!

Pisa pics:

09-02-28 Pisa