Europe Day 11: Driving Day (Venice to Pisa to Florence)

One stop packing
Today was a driving day – with really not too much to look forward to except one stop at Pisa. Beginning today, we have begun to streamline our packing and leaving procedure for bus days as these early mornings are just too chaotic trying to go up and down between breakfast and waking up and bringing luggage down and boarding. All at once is good by me.

Rolling, rolling, rolling
The fast pace and constant things to do is starting to catch up with me so I basically passed out on this really long drive to Pisa. Leona says she abhors Pisa because it’s become a tourist trap with nothing much to see, and tons of “looky-looky” men about, so we’re only going to be there for about 45 minutes. Enough time to get the tourista photos everyone’s dying to get, get to a bathroom, maybe grab some food and that’s it.

Pisa
Within the central walls of the palace grounds, there is only the church, the palace and the bell tower (Tower of Pisa). Besides that, there is only a very small town outside the walls and nothing much else there. As Leona noted, what there IS lots, and lots, and lots of are souvenir and tourist shops, stalls, cafes, etc. However, regardless of all that – there are still a TON of people there who had come to see the Tower and town.

Typical Pics
With Liz and Chris, H-Rabbit and I ventured off to take the “usual” poses – even Gnomie got into the game. What was hilarious was that there was an entire field length of tourists all lined up taking the exact same photo! Apparently us humans just aren’t creative enough to think of anything new! All along the field, the place had set-up stone or marble pillars that were strung together with chains. There were also a ton of "No walking on the grass" signs. This left people basically climbing up onto the stone pillars to get the perfect shot of themselves with the tower without having anything else in the background. If I was steadier on my feet - I may have tried it - but we decided keeping ourselves planted on the ground was good enough for us.

Looky-Looky!
My funniest moment in Pisa was definitely when standing beside some of the Looky-Looky men who had laid out all their wares along one of the entrance roads, all one sheets or blankets – I’d say about 4 or 5 of them at least, with more standing around holding their wares on their arms. Well – within five seconds of a whistle and one lone man running through the street – these other men had packed up their stuff and gone running at top speed (god knows where). A minute or two alter came the strolling policeman. My comparison pictures are hilarious – first – the street is teeming full of people and products – five seconds later it’s totally empty – like they’d never been there at all. Ha!

NOTE: I guess I might have to explain what “looky-looky” men are. Basically, most of the sellers of fake purses, sunglasses, children’s toys, etc. along the streets of Italy seem to be all ethnic immigrants (which when looked at with a social perspective is extremely sad and aggravating) – and definitely do not know (or pretend not to know) English and/or Italian as a base language – therefore the only words they have seemed to pick up in order to get tourists to look at what they are selling is “Looky-looky”. And yes – it’s true – they do actually say that – over and over and over again. The sight of this actually bugged me a lot – I may post separately later about this incident as a whole after the trip.

Off to Florence
After everyone had satisfied his or her picture urges, we headed off to Florence. While I understand where Leona’s distaste for the city has stemmed from, I wish we had been able to spend more time there – if even to simply feel relaxed while we had stopped instead of consistently daily grind of go-go-go – especially on a day when time didn’t seem to be much of an issue.

On the road
The passage to Florence was quite beautiful, with the countryside including lots of sights of small towns, and fields and fields of sunflowers at every turn. It would have been nice to be able to stop every once in awhile at a lookout or such – but it seems Europe hasn’t developed the same knack as North America for creating lookout points along the highways. All there seems to be is service stations with really bad views, and nothing else nearby.

Firenze!
When we arrived in Florence, we went first to our pretty cool hotel, and then got ready for our included dinner in the city. We were dropped off along the river, which was a beautiful sight in the last glimpses of the sunset. Our dinner seemed to be at a family restaurant, where we were served spaghetti, garlic bread, salad and peaches.

Regatta! No…. RED GARTER!
From dinner we then went to Red Garter, which turned out to be a really great pub night. It was a lively bar with two different rooms, the major one catered to large-scale karaoke later on during the night. Our drinks (mixed drinks!) were served to us in pitchers! Obviously – it was a guaranteed way to get fairly smashed. Since the karaoke was bar-wide (and there were hundreds and hundreds of people there) it turned into a really raucous night, with tons of singing, dancing and having fun. I think everyone left that night pretty happy.

NOTE: Funny story (re: title above) – for days Leona had been telling us that we were definitely going to have two amazing nights in Florence – one at Red Garter and one at Space nightclub – however – because of her Australian accent – everyone who wasn’t Aussie had no clue that she was actually saying “Red Garter” – we all thought she was saying REGATTA! So to say the least – some of us (I won’t say who) actually thought we were going to view some local Regatta – not go to a bar named Red Garter.

Tucking In
After the bar – some of the group headed with Leona to Space Nightclub (where we are going tomorrow anyway) and the rest of us headed home to get some sleep for the long day ahead in Florence. I didn’t want to be disappointed again like I was in Venice by missing the Gondola ride – so I knew I wanted to be fresh, alert, healthy and fast in order to make sure I didn’t miss my other “want” of the trip – to see “David”!