Rick and Donna have been here, and we’ve been out having a good time, so I haven’t had much time to work, edit pictures, or write blogs. Sorry, Mom… I’ll try to mend my ways.
Fortunately, it’s been fun. Sunday and Monday were those get-settled-in-and-used-to-the-time-difference sort of days, and so we did a fair bit of wandering around, had a couple of great dinners, walked up to the Piazzle Michangelo and then up to San Minato, and generally had a good time doing nothing really earth-shattering. Since Rick and Donna are foodies, we tried twice to show them the Mercado Centrale over the weekend, but each time we showed up the place was closed—finally, we checked the hours and found that it’s closed EVERY day after 1:00. Doh.
Tuesday, we hopped a train headed for the coast. The trains here can be a little confusing at first, and it took a few minutes to sort out which ticket we needed and then where to go meet the train itself. It’s also been a challenge to figure out how the international trains are scheduled and what tickets cost, so we still don’t really know what we’re doing next weekend. But once you’re on the train with ticket in hand, it’s a pleasant trip. They’re convenient, they’re fast, and some trips can be VERY cheap—tickets to Pisa (a little over an hour away) were something like €5 each way. It’s also a nice way to see the countryside, and this part of Italy is really beautiful.
Our first stop was in Pisa, with a plan to check out the city and its famous leaning tower. The train station and the area where all the tourist stuff is are on opposite sides of town, so we had a walk of maybe a mile or so each way. Along the way, we saw this tiny chapel along the river—Chiesa Santa Maria della Spina. Besides its age (it was built starting in 1230), it was especially interesting for the way it was placed aside the Arno; it looked almost as though it was there long before the river was routed along that particular path. Later in the day we ran into a Scottish chap who explained that a bridge used to cross at that point, and that there was some interest among the artists and history buffs in the community to have it rebuilt. In any case, it’s been perched in that spot for hundreds of years now, and I’m sure it will go on long after we’re all gone, barring any major overflows of the Arno that might carry it away.
Moving along from the chapel, we headed toward Pisa’s tower and the Duomo. We were able to spot the tower from a couple blocks away, and it most definitely leans… I think it’s got about an 80-85 degree angle of tilt (this image doesn't really do that justice), and it’s pretty weird to see it hanging there like that. There, we took the obligatory tourist pictures and also one of my travel-bug hitchhiker, Builder Bob. After checking into the cost to climb the tower and finding that tickets were €15 and involved a two-hour wait, we decided to skip it and headed back toward the train station, taking a bunch of pictures along the way.
The next stop, about ten minutes away, was Viareggio. Rick chose it because it was on the coast, but I didn’t realize until we hit the street there that it was very much a beach town, complete with the same laid-back attitude of every place I’ve ever surfed in California. We walked the mile and a half or so to the shore, crossed the sand to the water, and then Donna and I shed our shoes so we could get our feet wet in the Ligurian Sea. The water was warm and there were still kids playing in the waves, and we picked up shells and watched the sun set as we walked another half mile or so down to the marina. It was one of the most profound reminders I’ve had of home to date, and it wouldn’t have taken much to make me paddle out until dark. You can take the kid away from the ocean, I suppose, but you take the ocean out of this California girl.We grabbed a slice of pizza on the way back in a little snack shop near the train station. Since we had a few minutes to wait out before our train left, we stopped into another café to see about having a drink. As it turned out, this was really more of a cappuccino bar, but they had a few liquors on the wall and with some specific explanation of what we wanted, we all had drinks in hand in the five minutes or so before the place closed. Trouble was, the inexperience behind the bar translated into a “part” being about three ounces of whatever liquor went into the drink, and Donna and I ended up with some serious firewater that we both knew we’d never be able to consume without keeping our proprietors WAY beyond their closing time, so we asked for plastic cups and, unbelievably, got them. After crossing the road to the train station and finding our train, we asked the Trenitalia employee on the ramp if it was okay to have our drinks on the train, to which she replied that there was no drink service on this trip. After trying again to clarify what we meant, the woman says, “Oh! Drunks on train! Yes, yes! Go ahead!” We boarded with a laugh, and although I still was never able to finish my own drink, we sipped them carefully as the train passed through the Italian night toward its last stop in Florence.
More to come about Siena and San Gigimiano. ‘Till tomorrow…
-Leanne
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