She Gave A New Meaning to the Leaning Tower of Pisa...

If you can tell me what musical I have o so wittily decided to quote for this post's title, you win. Not sure what you win yet, but you win. And it's cheating to ask my dad. Unless you are my dad.

So the whole group of us got ourselves to the train station by noon, which, for college student with a day off, can be a difficult thing to do. But we get on this train and ride the hours to Pisa, renowned for grave citizens. ((if you don't get that joke, it's in Taming of the Shrew))

Now, I knew Pisa was going to be a small town, but you would think in a place where tourist are always going would become a haven for shopping and hotels and, well, other ways to spend your money. Pisa has one main drag, and when we walked down it the first time, over half of the shops weren't open. The tower and the train station are on opposite sides of town, but that's not a big deal, since it's only a 10 minute walk from one end to the other.

The tower is cool, I will admit. For about two minutes. We immediately headed over to the green grassy area where all the Japanese tourists were taking pictures. I hadn't thought of this before, but do you know how ridiculous everyone looks when they're trying to pose with the tower? I mean, to everyone except the person with the camera, you look kinda crazy.

After about an hour of picture taking ((there were seven of us, so no, an hour is not excessive)), we decided to go search around for lunch before heading to the one other stop we had in this city, a world famous chocolate shop. That I'd never heard of. But I like chocolate, so I was along for the ride. This part of the adventure begins with the fact that the map we had which marked this shop was wrong. As in put it on the opposite side of the map from where it really was. Then we walked right past it. Twice. And kept going another three blocks. FYI, blocks in Italy are long. So we had given up on this chocolate and were walking back to head to the station when we happened to see a natural gelato shop. Intrigued, we went in. I mean, we should be rewarded after our long and unsuccessful mission.

Friends, this gelato was mind blowing. All the flavors were not only fresh and delicious, but unique. For instance, my flavor combination was (a) creama ((which is the custard stuff that comes inside croissants, etc)) with saffron and (b) pear with cocoa beans. Chocolate pear. It was like heaven on a flat plastic neon colored spoon. And guess what was next door? The chocolate shop! The day was officially a success, and we headed home.

Other than that, it's been back to school, nothing really exciting. We're watching The Magdalene Sisters in my History of Prostitution class. We've only seen half so far and I cried the whole 15 minute walk home.