I apologize for the complete lack of updating! I’m going to play catch up now that I’m DONE! So I’ll start where I left off. We had our first test the Saturday morning after our first full week here, then had the rest of the weekend to ourselves. We decided to take a trip to Pisa and Florence, and it was a blast. We left Cortona around 12 after our test, and took the train to Pisa for the rest of the afternoon and evening. This was my first time on a train and it turned out to be a fun adventure…I ended up sitting by a man who was watching The Lucky One on DVD so I caught the tail end of that, and after the movie was over he actually chatted with us a little which was a fun way to pass the time. His name was Flavio and he was on a trip to see his family for the week. He was definitely what you’d call a silver fox. Anyway, after arriving in Pisa we checked in to our hostel before making the trek to the Leaning Tower! I’m not going to lie, it was pretty awesome to see in person. We probably stood around on the lawn for 30 minutes taking different pictures before finding a restaurant for dinner. We ended up finding a cute bar/cafe with outside seating for all nine of us where the waiters loved us. I had gnocchi with tomato and mozzarella for dinner, and split a bottle of Chianti DOC with a friend. I think my mom is rubbing off on me, because Chianti has been one of my favorite wines since being here. (Fun fact, it is called Chianti because of the region where the grapes are grown. The grapes themselves are not the “Chianti” grape). After our waiter brought us all a free shot of limoncello, we headed back to see the Leaning Tower one last time at dusk, then walked back to our hostel to what turned out to be an interesting night. Our hostel was super nice (shoutout to Hostel Pisa!) and had an awesome lobby that had food and drinks, so we ended up staying up until around 1:30 in the morning hanging out with a lot of the other people that were staying there. We made friends with some Italian military guys (the red headed Italian I’m sure you saw on my facebook…he insisted I upload it on the spot), drank some more wine, played pool, and sat outside on their patio.
Our train to Florence was set to leave at 7:39 the next morning, so that was fun to wake up for, but we made it! We got to Florence around 9 am and stopped for breakfast where I got the best ham and cheese omelet I have ever had. We were in Florence for a total of around 12 hours…we saw the David, ventured through the leather market, ventured to the Ponte Vecchio bridge, and pretty much walked from one end of the city to the other. After a night of minimal sleep, we were all completely dead by 5 p.m., but it was still a great time. We tried to go to dinner at a place called Acque al Due (thanks for the recommendation Holley!), but they were completely slammed with reservations until 9.30 that evening so we ended up going to a random place on our walk back to the train where I got a greek salad.
I enjoyed Florence, but it was a little too large for my liking…but that could also be because I was a walking zombie and my feet were killing me. Guess I’ll have to go back sometime to give it a second chance. We ended up getting back to Cortona around 11:30 that night and took a cab from the train station to our dorm, in which I’m pretty sure our cab driver scraped the side of his car on a building on the way up.
