The Leaning Tower

venerdi, 17 giugno 2016

Hello, sorry for the delayed post. We have been quite busy lately!

Today we started out on our great Tuscan adventure! We went on a bus trip organized by the school and started out the trip by visiting Pisa!

It was about a five hour bus ride to Pisa and we stopped about halfway. At the stop, Kelsey and I tried a couple of pastries for brunch. One was filled with custard and the other with pistachio filling.

The pistachio one looks scary, but it tasted good!

Once we made it to Pisa, we had a guided tour of the town. The tour guide explained some of the history of the duomo, the baptistery, and of course, the leaning tower! It was also the feast day of the patron saint of Pisa, so there was a large market in celebration of that day.

One of our first views approaching the tower

After the tour ended, Kelsey and I ventured a few minutes to find the river, then we returned to the market and got porchetta sandwiches. These were sandwiches made with pork that had been roasted with the head still on, so it looked a bit intimidating. The pork was wonderfully seasoned, but it was quite fatty as it hadn't been trimmed. I enjoyed it, but Kelsey wasn't quite sold, especially on the parts that still had skin.

 Mmm! Porchetta!

We didn't think to take a picture at the time, but imagine something like this

While we ate, we enjoyed watching a street performer playing a recorder. We thought of our wonderful friend, Audrey, and her fun little wooden recorder while we watched.

Kelsey was so amused by this!

After lunch is when I had a bit of a mishap that Kelsey surely will not let me hear the end of. I've been teasing her about a number of little things throughout the trip, so she was more than pleased to have something similar for me. It all started out simple enough: I saw several stands with a variety of olives and thought it would be fun to buy some to try. Apparently the owner of the stand that I stopped at was a bit more enthusiastic than I was. I asked for just a few of each and he quickly started scooping rather large scoops of each type of olive. I tried to indicate that I did not want that many olives, but I he still loaded up the bag with way more than I possibly needed! Unfortunately, I ended up spending €10 on olives, which was not quite what I had in mind, but as Kelsey pointed out, the memories we will have from that little adventure are priceless!

I know what I'll be eating for a while!

Now on to the part that you all are probably expecting me to talk about: the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Quite honestly, there isn't that much to say about it. It is indeed a tower (a bell tower, to be exact) and it does most certainly lean.

It was one of those things that you always see in pictures but never expect to actually see in person, so being able to see the tower in real life was an odd, yet cool experience. Of course, we took many of pictures, so here are a few of them!

Oh no! It's about to fall!

Let's just straighten that up a bit

Timber!!

Don't mind me...I'm not pushing a tower down or anything...

I guess you don't want to get on her bad side!

After taking pictures with the tower, we went to the baptistery, which was surprisingly large. Because of the shape of the dome, the acoustics in the baptistery are really cool. They had a demo the we were there for where a guy basically sang different notes and the echo of each kept going for quite a while and all overlapped. (It's called a chord. Love, Kelsey) It was very neat to hear! We also visited the duomo, or cathedral, which was very large as well.

Inside the duomo!

After our visit to Pisa, we got back on the bus to head to our hotel, which is halfway between Pisa and Florence in a town called Montecatini Terme. We had a nice dinner at the hotel and got some much needed rest before heading to Florence the following day!

Tempo di mangiare alcune olive!

Allison and Kelsey