Pisa and Lucca

Longest day ever. To make up for doing nothing exciting yesterday Marilena and I decided to go to Pisa today. SU puts on trips every weekend to different Italian cities and today happened to be the trip to Pisa and Lucca – even though you’re SPOSED to sign up ahead of time, neither Marilena nor I had signed up sooo we showed up at school this morning at 7:30 (busses left at 8) to see if we could squeeze ourselves on.

It took about an hour to drive to Pisa, then after unloading in the bus parking lot it took me about 30 minutes to walk to where the famous leaning tower was. Stupid foot. We got the privilege of touring the baptistery, cathedral, and cemetery. The tour was very interesting – Neil was our tour guide and he is here in Firenze doing his dissertation at SUF. We all had to wear little radios around our neck and earpieces and Neil had a microphone so that we could hear his little shpeals. He was cool. As we were walking around listening to him he’d always ask if “tera had caught up” and I’d have to like raise my hand cuz I was going so slow. Hahahahahaha.

Some funny/random/cool stuff to know about Pisa: a) there were a MILLION bugs flying around. I’m not kidding. We were bombarded several times by literal hurricanes of bugs. It was freakin nasty. B) there were “purse people” everywhere (for anyone NOT in the Linsley family, a “purse person” is a black guy that lays out all their fake Gucci’s, Prada’s, Chanel’s, etc on a tarp to sell, then peaces out the second a cop shows up since what they’re doing is incredibly illegal in so many ways).

I got great pictures!

After trekking past the purse people to the bus we headed toward a little town called Lucca – ANYONE THAT PLANS ON VISITING ITALY IN THE NEAR FUTURE SHOULD DEFINETELY STOP BY LUCCA! Marilena, Amelia, and I had a lunch at a little outdoor restaurant then used our 2 hours of free time to go shopping at an out door market/fair. (I bought a pink coin purse… I love it). Lucca seriously has excellent shopping. Very chic, expensive, stores… if my foot wasn’t killing me I totally would have spent most of my summer earnings today.

THEN it started to rain. This was the first time I had to be outside, with my crutches while it was raining. (oh, we also bought umbrellas). The tour of Lucca probably could have been really cool but I was in so much pain from walking/crutching/leaning that I didn’t enjoy a minute of it. My friends and the tour guide were all really friendly and understanding and helpful though which was nice. Amelia, Marilena, and I ended up ditching the tour early and headed back to the bus (where the tour group ended up only 5 minutes after us… I know, I’m slow). We got kinda lost but a cute guy was cool and showed us the way…

We finally got home around 6:30ish and were exhausted.

My awkward story of the day (that I’m still feeling awkward about): SU requires that our host family only makes us dinner Monday through Friday… today is our first Saturday where we were left to fend for ourselves. Around 8 we started to brainstorm what to do for dinner when Luca (our “host brother”) came in and mumbled something about cooking pasta and blah blah blah blah blah (all in REALLY REALLY REALLY FAST ITALIAN). Marilena and I were stoked that he offered to make us pasta until we realized that we probably didn’t hear him right – 15 minutes later he was sitting on the couch happiliy eating pasta… hm, um, Luca? Were you ever going to tell us that dinner was ready?! So we pranced into the kitchen to find… nothing. Wait, what? I thought he was going to cook us dinner. I guess not. My dinner tonight consisted of some saltine crackers and sour grapefruit candies that I found in my backpack!!!