Lady in Spain

First off, I am really sorry for my lack of blogging. There was really no way I could blog while in Italy and then I needed to get adjusted to being back at school. Now that I’m more into my groove of things, I feel like I can finally write my Italy posts. First up, Pisa!

Our trip began with a RyanAir flight straight to Pisa. This was my first time ever flying RyanAir and after all the horror stories I’d heard, I was more than a little anxious about the flight. My friend Diana ended up being in the fetal position for most of the flight since the flight attendant somehow managed to stuff Diana’s carry-on under her seat, which meant Diana had no leg room. None. I was okay for the flight until the landing. Worst landing I have ever experienced. I was fairly certain we were going to land sideways on the tarmac. Everyone was rocking side-to-side as we went down the runway. Granted, we all laughed about it afterward, but it was still scary.

Once I had my bag, Diana and I made our way to the bus we needed in order to get to our hostel. We had a slight bump finding the hostel from the bus stop because the directions we had were terrible. Would it kill people to use street names when giving directions? Once we finally made it to the hostel, we dropped off our bags and went off to find the tower. Now, let me be clear that in the entire walk from the bus stop to the hostel, Diana and I had not seen the tower. So when we left our hostel, we began walking in the direction we assumed the tower would be. This only lasted for about 3 minutes when we decided we were heading in the wrong direction and proceeded to turn around. Diana then says, “Oh my god, Yari. Look!” I had no idea what she wanted me to look at and I thought she was pointing at the car parked in front of us so I was really confused…until I looked up and saw the tower! Suffice it to say that we felt pretty damn stupid at that point. I had to take a picture to commemorate the moment we saw it:

Obviously, getting there after that was easy. Both Diana and I were surprised that we liked the tower as much as we did. It’s one of my favorite things that I saw in all of Italy. We spent about an hour or so at the tower taking pictures and just looking around the surrounding area. Here’s my typical tourist picture:

We were pretty hungry after this, but it was only 4, so we decided to grab some pizza to hold us over until dinner time. The pizza place was right next to our hostel and the pizza was actually pretty damn good. After this, we went back to our hostel to relax a bit and rest before venturing out to find dinner. Once 7:30 rolled around, we left the hostel in pursuit of food. Now, let me tell you that we are pretty use to European dinner time so we knew that dinner would likely begin at around 7…so we were pretty confused when we couldn’t find a place that was open! Then after walking around so much trying to find a place, we started to get picky about where we wanted to eat because after such a long wait, we wanted something good. We eventually decided on a place and had some DELICIOUS pasta. This was my plate:

We went to a gelateria afterwards for dessert and those were also amazingly good. Probably my 2nd favorite gelato (I got nutella) that I had during the entire trip.

That’s a wrap on Pisa. I’m not even going to tell the story of trying to get to the train station the next day for our train to Florence. I don’t want to relive it. Just know that the buses decided they weren’t going to run that day, so Diana and I had to walk to the station with our bags and it took well over an hour. Oh and we hadn’t eaten anything other than granola bars and chips so we were starving. I’ll update soon with the Florence part of our trip. That may end up being more than one post, though, because we were in Florence for 5 days. ¡Hablamos pronto!