Stopover in Pisa

As you can imagine, we were pretty excited to get out of Cinque Terre and into a city with a little more, well..."city." We took an early train out of the CT and were on our way in no time.

Pisa is not far from the Cinque Terre, and more or less on the way to Siena, so we decided to do a stop there to check out the Leaning Tower and get a brief glimpse of the rest of the city. After storing our luggage and picking up a map, we exited the train station. We had grown quite accustomed to the rain in Cinque Terre, so we weren't going to let the fact that it was pretty much pouring rain get in the way of our fun.

Speaking of getting in the way-- have any of you ever traveled through major Italian cities on rainy days? Well, this was our first time, and as we exited the station sharing our crummy umbrella, we had to run the gauntlet of men selling umbrellas to ill-prepared tourists.

"Umbrella, Umbrella?" Uh, no thanks. "Umbrella, Umbrella?" Uh, no we're fine, thanks. "Umbrella, Umbrella? Look, we said no to the last two guys, so no, no thanks. "Umbrella, Umbrella?" SERIOUSLY? No! "Umbrella, Umbrella" Is this some kind of joke? "Umbrella, Umbrella?" AHHHH!H!H!H!H.

You get the idea. Eventually, we gave in after the 103rd person asked us. I guess that's how the system works. As we walked the city crowded with umbrella-outfitted tourists and locals, we took in the sights.








Eventually we made it to the tower. I had seen it when I was 15, and it seemed to lean even more than I remembered!





After checking out a few buildings on the Piazza dei Miracoli and doing some light shopping at the long stretch of tourist shops on the square, we headed back to the train station to hop on our train to Siena.