Once again, I found myself running around a train station. The train left for Pisa left at 10:30am and we arrived at with 15 minutes to spare—except we actually couldn’t spare them because it took Maddy, Sami and I about 14.5 minutes to figure out how to work the TrenItalia ticket booth. But once we got on the train, the hour-long trip to Pisa through Tuscany was quite scenic. Tuscany’s pretty little hillside vineyards and hills are a green contrast to the cobblestone streets of Florence. So I figured Pisa would be just another extension of the beautiful Tuscan landscape.

Wrong. Pisa is actually nothing more than a hole-in-the-wall town. It was filled with construction and pigeons (I didn’t mind the pigeons, but my roommates didn’t care for them). Once you walk down the long street filled with holes and metal gates, you follow the rest of the thousands of tourists to the leaning tower. I never really thought the lean would be so evident, but whoever constructed this building was way off base.

It was fun to try to take the typical corny photos every other tourist was taking. It was even more interesting to try to hop up on a concrete step in a skirt to get just the perfect photo—but we got it. And the man who took the photo of Maddy, Sami and I was from NC. Small world. :)