A tiny Pisa Firenze

Previous night's trip had made sure this wasn't going to be a relaxed holiday. We had gotten back from Venice at 8am and had to be on our train to Florence at 10am. That left us with just enough time to take a breather, shower, have breakfast and head on back to the station which we were sadly feeling home now. The train ride to Florence was 3 hours long and fairly uneventful. The train itself was a swanky new Eurostar, much better than the ones that run from London.

Upon reaching Florence, we immediately picked up tickets on the next available train to Pisa. Pisa is only an hour away from Florence and I hadn't come this far not to see the much talked about leaning tower. There isn't anything else to do in Pisa other than the leaning tower, so we figured a total round trip to Pisa of 3 hours should do fine. Having gotten to Pisa we took a local bus ticket. Anusha insisted that we buy just a 1 hour ticket since we will be back at that station by that time. Even the ticket clerk expressed his surprise as the express nature of the visit and reluctantly gave us a 1 hour ticket. Luckily for us, there was a bus just about to leave for the tower complex and we quickly boarded that. 10 minutes later, we were at the Piazza dei Miracoli "Square of Miracles". The piazza has four main buildings: the Duomo, the tower, the Camposanto monumentale ("monumental cemetery") and the Baptistery.

There and a bunch of shops and cafes. The tourists are totally set up here. I bet these places are twice as expensive as any other place in Pisa. For the next 20 minutes or so, we were happy snappers, clicking away some pictures of the tower: from the front, the back, the sides, everywhere, with us in the frame, without us in the frame and so on. Hey we were still better than about a hundred others there that were very eagerly shooting the famous leaning on the leaning tower or holding up the leaning tower position. I clicked one of Anusha with those folks in the background, just to capture the whole silliness of it.

I had heard mixed things from people who had been to the tower. Personally, I thought that the tower was much more impressive in real life than it is in the pictures. It is leaning a fair bit, some by design and some not. I do think its definitely worth a visit if you are in the area. Happy with the captured set of pictures, we grabbed a slice of pizza and some gelato and were back at that station within our ticket hour to catch our train back to Florence. We still had the whole of Florence to explore.

We were back in Florence by 4pm and walked into the tourist information center housed in this old historic building. Whatever happened to inviting people with a smile. Any tourist center we have been to in Europe with the exception of Milan and Stockholm have really grumpy people running it. They are no way helpful or nice. Rather I think they go out of their way to be mean to tourists. After a hiss and a grunt, she finally parted with a map. When asked what are some of the key places to visit given that we had limited time. She refused to help, pointing to the map and saying "It's on the map". After that very helpful conversation, we decided to follow the map and go to the nearest and what seemed like the top place to visit, florencja-fort-centrum kongresowe. The doors of the fort clearly said - NOT OPEN TO TOURISTS! Now this is the kind of information that is not on the map that I would expect a helpful person on a Tourist Information center to impart to tourists and we weren't the only ones there. A bunch of people walked away from those gates disappointed.

Not to be deterred, we continued on what was going to be our walk tour of Florence. The city center isn't huge and is very walkable. We walked by many of the sights, quaint streets, old houses, silly statues and piazzas and ended up on this street with an amazing view of the Duomo.

It looked as if someone had painted a huge stage background of the Duomo. The entire Duomo looks is very well painted and dressed up with modest gold paint in places. The small building right opposite the Duomo has a gold plated door with each of the gold plates being the canvas for amazingly detailed paintings.

The whole Duomo Piazza is a key attraction and opens up to the main shopping street with all the major name brands and nice little cafes. This is where Anusha had a plateful of the best pasta we've have ever tasted. It did Tuscany proud. We walked on further through some more narrow and beautiful streets, a small local produce market and ended up at the Palace square, where we sat and finished the rest of the pasta and took some pictures.

Our next stop was to walk to the famous bridge, the The Ponte Vecchio (Old Bridge), over the Arno river. This bridge is lined up with houses on either side and we didn't know that we were on the bridge until we got to the middle of it. Believe me, it looked much nicer from the inside than the outside. As per WikiPedia: "It is said that the economic concept of bankruptcy originated here: when a merchant could not pay his debts, the table on which he sold his wares (the "banco") was physically broken ("rotto") by soldiers, and this practice was called "bancorotto" (broken table; possibly it can come from "banca rotta" which means "broken bank"). Not having a table anymore, the merchant was not able to sell anything".

We took a different walk back to the station stopping by a local Italian live concert - where the guitarists were jamming, the drummer was on a roll and the singer was singing really well but just not together :-). Whenever the singer shut up, the music sounded really good.

Anusha was pretty full from the pasta earlier but I was still hungry. On our way back to the station through local streets we ran into a small Pakistani hole-in-the-wall type of place. Of course I walked in :). This is where all the Bangladeshi street hawkers seemed to hang out. I guessed the food was decent.I ordered a full-plate rice with Cabbage and Daal. Amazing quantity and quality for 4 Euros.

Before I knew it, we were back in the station in the ticket line. Seemed like most of our time on this trip was spent at one station or another. We watched a movie on the laptop on our train ride back and made our way back into Milan by 11pm. Tired from being in trains and stations in-between walking around in the cities, we retired for the night and were completely knocked out for the night.