No Thank You, Pisa

On Friday a group of us went to Pisa. It was terrible. Easily the worst experience I've had in Italy thus far. We get to Pisa just fine, about a 1.5 hour train ride from where we were at, and from then on everything went south. We were all jonesing for some pizza, so we head towards this random restaurant on the street that is clearly marked as a "pizzeria". Right before we walked into the place, these people told us not to go in there, and that the food was bad. We should have listened, but at that point it was 2 or so and we hadn't eaten all day so we just went for it. The food was so bad. And expensive. AND, despite being called a pizzeria, they did not have any pizza available at the time. So we each ended up paying about 15, 20 euro for an awful dish of pasta. Honestly worse than what I make for myself back in Madison. So we're all grouchy because of that experience, then it starts to rain. Pow.

The Classic Tower Pic

That just made matters worse, so now we're wandering around Pisa in the rain trying to find this tower and what not. First off, for how famous it is they make it difficult to find. It was really far from the train station, and there wasn't too many directions posted on how to get there. Second off, Pisa is kind of ghetto. It was pretty run down and somewhat sketchy. Thirdly, the tower isn't even that great. It's not really tall or anything, and it leans a lot less than you'd expect it to. So that was a let down as well. Pretty much just everything that could have gone wrong went wrong. To top off the visit, one of my buddies forgot his ipod on the train, and when he went back to the platform to look for it, he saw it in the window of the train as the train was pulling out of the station. Pretty tragic. But that was our day at Pisa. I would not recommend wasting your time there. Literally all there is to do is to take your picture at the tower.

Some of the crew at the tower

Saturday, however, made up for Pisa. There are all these hills / mountains everywhere in Tuscany. And there's some right by where we're staying in Sesto. So four of us decided to go hike around in these mountains during the day. It was a ton of fun. It was a pretty steep hike, but we found some really cool places, and got some unreal views of Florence and Sesto from up in the mountains. We hiked up to this really nice Villa in the mountain, as well as to this church that was supposedly build around the year 1,000. So that was neat just to see something that old in such a random place. The trees are really different here from back home, so that was kind of cool to see, and there was a ton of olive trees all over the place during this hike. Definitely is something that I'll be doing frequently now that I know how to get there / get up there and all. After that a group of us guys went into Florence for dinner at this place called Dante's. It's a good spot, and they also give students free wine. The wine isn't that good, but it's free, so there ya go. Then we wandered around looking for a place to just chill for a little bit, and we came across this Irish pub. So we were there for a while, then called it a night. AND, for lunch on saturday, we went to this small cafe in Sesto right by our Villa, and had possibly the best meal I've had since being here. The food is really good there, and everything is only 4.50, which makes it even better. So to sum up this post. Friday = Awful, Saturday = a lot of fun. Other than Dante's, I haven't gone anywhere twice yet, which is really nice. Trying a ton of different restaurants and bars. Now it's nothing but homework and relaxing this week in preparation for OKTOBERFEST IN MUNICH all weekend next weekned. Needless to say I'm very excited. I'll do another post tomorrow or Tuesday before I head out for the weekend talking about classes so far and what not.

This picture is one of the many views we had on our hike. Pictures really don't do this place justice. You can actually see our Villa. It's in kind of the middle of the picture, off to the left just a tad. It's the building kind of surrounded by trees, right in front of all the other buildings of Sesto.