Lots of Leaning and Confetti

My luck with good travelling weather just seems to continue! I went to Pisa and Viareggio for a weekend with 4 and 2 other students, respectively, and both cities were absolutely beautiful.

Excitement on the train!

Our trip to Pisa started on Saturday the 16^th.  When we arrived it was about 50 degrees (F) and sunny. We walked to our hotel, which was about 15 minutes away from Pisa Centrale and dumped our stuff before heading out to the Leaning Tower, Baptistery, and Duomo. (The hostel was called Lumiere, and I definitely recommend it if you’re headed to Pisa, but be warned – they claim to be a B&B but don’t actually serve breakfast).

Super content to be eating food

We hopped on a bus back to the train station but walked the rest of the way to the north side of the city. We stopped by a small supermercato (which seems counter-intuitive but there you go). I bought some bread, prosciutto, and a mango juice (!!!!!) for lunch and we ate as we walked.

We stopped by Piazza Cavour on the way, which was in the midst of some construction, and we also went into the church right there.  

Cavour

My first words upon seeing the Tower were “It’s not that lean-y” because I am clearly too arrogant from my own good and the angle I was looking wasn’t the best. I was also incredibly surprised to see how incredibly white it was; I expected it to be more dingy since, after all, it is 800+ years old. We asked how much it was to go up the Tower — 18 euro, so we didn’t. To be honest, I’m a little regretful about that, but I also know it would’ve been terribly exhausting and probably ruined Sunday’s day trip.

Il Duomo di Pisa

Il Battistero

You don't need a caption for this 

Super Tourist

We more or less spent the rest of the afternoon basking in the Tower’s glory and took an obscene amount of pictures in front of the Duomo, Battistero, and Tower.

On the way back to our hostel we came across La Chiesa di Santa Maria. Unforutnately, it was closed, but the view was great, and it was right on the river.

We also ran into some kind of protest, but we still aren’t entirely sure what it was about. Next, of course, was gelato. The place we found had gluten-free cones too so one of the girls I was traveling with was able to have her first official coned gelato, which was super exciting :)

That night two of our group headed back to Parma, the rest of us raided a small market and ate bread, salame Toscana, and had a simple night in before our travels to Viareggio.

The next morning we got up, got dressed, only to realize that our B&B didn’t actually provide a breakfast, but instead we could use their kitchen to prepare food. After settling with the owners we walked to the train station and found DIRT cheap tickets to Viareggio – less than 4 euro! We bought some breakfast foods nearby, and I got a souvenir for my dad before going to Viareggio.

Once we arrived we essentially followed a crowd of people to the edge of the small town and found the Carnevale event. It almost resembled a fair — you bought an entry ticket, couldn’t leave, and spent the day wandering inside. There was also the nice surprise of being able to see the Mediterranean. Long story short, Viareggio was amazing for its Carnevale festivities and the floats were INSANE. I’ve uploaded all of my pictures to Facebook, but here are my absolute favorite floats: