Christmas Eve! Woo! Leaning Tower of Pisa! Woo!
...
Okay, so maybe I wasn't as excited for this day as I make it sound, but we did get to sleep in. That's always a bonus!
Our third and final day in Florence, hop on a bus at 9:30 and head of to Pisa to see the tower. The drive was about an hour, and then we got off and went on these weird... McDonald sponsored train cards to get to the actual town or village and let me tell you... there really is nothing there except the tower and the church. Also, maybe since it was Christmas Eve, the town was remarkably dead. So we arrived, and then after looking at the tower and the tourists taking their photos of it, me and my siblings quickly hurried off to explore and see if there was any other interesting thing around. Somewhere along the way our mom popped up, alone - apparently our dad had gone in to the church - and we made our way to a Burger King that our tour director told us had free washrooms. Well. Free if we ordered food - but were pretty hungry so we got a box of chicken wings. Stupidly, we only got 9 among the four of us, which was a decision we would later regret because lunch that day was not happening until 2:30 leaning more towards 3 and by then, I was absolutely dying. But anyway, we sat at the BK, used their washrooms (which you could only enter with a door code that was provided on the receipts) and each sat on our phones using the free wifi. We also ended up getting in to a rousing discussion about noticing grammar mistakes and whatnots in English and how common it was for people to care (my sister cares very much, me and my brother notice mistakes but care less so, but we both concluded that the majority of people don't care).
Here's the test - if you read on a card: Wish You a Merry Christmas.
Question 1: What is wrong with this?
Question 2: Does it bug you?
Anyway - moving on. So, bus ride to lunch. Super, super long. We arrived sometime after 2:30 - it was cold, and before we could even eat we had to stand outside listening to the son of the owner of the restaurant (it was a family restaurant at the families home, which used to be a villa owned by the Medici) - but he stood there explaining to us about his family and the history of the place and the whole time I was just like "GIVE ME THE DAMN FOOD".
Eventually we were led to food though. Me and my siblings parked our butts at a table sitting right in front of a fireplace and lunch was served.
First dish, appetizer, slices of bread that were plain, with tomatoes on top, and with some tomato-cheese paste on top, and to go along with it, two types of olive oil. I know nothing about food and cooking, both the oils tasted the same to me, and damn it was delicious. This restaurant and family are famous for their olive oil apparently. Next came the pasta, I forgot what it was, and then the main course which was a huge piece of pork (not my favourite) with a very interesting side of mashed potatoes mixed with some pureed vegetable that I didn't catch (it was kind of reddish orange). Dessert was a lemon cake that wasn't too sweet, wasn't too lemony - but by this point I was so full I kind of wanted to throw up - and I didn't even finish my pork chop.
Finally lunch ended, and we made our way back to Florence, but first we stopped at a nice little look out point so that everyone could take pictures of the city. By the time we arrived it was 5PM.
This is important because throughout the whole trip, our travel director insisted we would have tons of free time to ourselves to go shopping and whatnot and to be honest? We didn't. Every night we always got back at 5PM, 6PM, and considering tonight was Christmas Eve (the night he gave us the most time) - pretty much most of the stores were closed. After we got back to the hotel, my parents had to recharge a bit, and somehow we didn't end up leaving until 5:45 so we really only had... barely an hour to walk around before everything shut down. We didn't buy anything. Darn.
In the end, I didn't even get dinner because I needed to run back to the hotel to use the washroom and my parents went off to get sandwiches, but I had forgotten to tell them to get me one (my brother didn't need one cause he still had his one from yesterday) and so I just settled with eating whatever was leftover from the night before and devouring the fruit cake. Not the best dinner - needless to say I went to bed very early that night after watching HTTYD2. Oh well. At least breakfast came with a lot of food?
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