It rained today! A relief from the blinding heat (though not the humidity). It is supposed to continue raining tomorrow and I have never wanted rain more. The heat makes ones lethargic and the humidity makes it difficult for me to breathe.
We learned a lesson last night: know your train schedules before you get on one! Especially if there are multiple trains to take before you arrive at your destination. But I should start from the beginning.
We took a trip to Pisa on Saturday. I’m going to be honest; it was pretty underwhelming. The town of Pisa did not have much going on besides the Leaning Tower, which was entirely composed of tourists taking the obvious tourist pictures. I refused to take an obvious photo (holding up the tower or pushing it over). It was fun to see in person though because you can not only tell how dramatically it is leaning, but also how the architect tried to counterbalance the leaning as soon as he realized what was happening.
No, the tower was unimpressive compared to the acoustics of the baptistery. The architects really knew what they were doing with this one. The dome was built in such a way that one man could harmonize beautifully with his own echo. It was haunting and extremely spiritual to hear.
[video of the echo coming soon!]
The thought that I had while walking through the baptistery and the church was how much time and care had gone into simply constructing these beautiful buildings. Each building was thought about in terms of its building shape (the baptistery in terms of acoustics and echoing three times with the holy trinity and the church’s floor plan was laid out like the cross that Jesus was crucified on), the sculptures carved into the walls and ceilings (the bronze door is a pictorial version of the new testament so that the illiterate poor could still be knowledgeable of the word of God), and the breathtaking paintings lining every wall. Italy is truly holds the most history and beauty in a single location.
Following the path of life, we walked from the church to the burial area where the wealthiest of the remains of Pisa are kept. These dead are placed in the floor and along the walls in intricately carved marble coffins. I was surprised to see a grave marker with a death date in 2009! A reminder that history is constantly being made **.
Dopo, nostra siamo andate a Cinque Terre. (Oh yeah, we just learned past-tense in Italian class!) Later, we went to Cinque Terre! We took an hour-long train from Pisa to the beautiful town of Monterosso on the Mediterranean Sea. It was so liberating to see the expanse of sea in front of us and the water was much warmer than the Pacific Ocean (I speak as a Northern Californian where the water at our beaches arrive from the Alaskan current…brrrr). The town was so colorful and alive (though, again, full of tourists). We got to witness the beginning of the Cinque Terre Music Festival too! Marching bands from each of the five towns of the Cinque Terre processed in a corteo through town. As we brushed the sticky sand off our legs and began our return to Firenze, a newer band had taken the stage to sing “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” (a personal favorite of mine).
And here we have reached the story that I hastened to at the beginning of this post! We didn’t quite move in circles, but we certainly could have in the time it took us to return to our temporary home. Our tickets were bought for an 8 o’clock train that would take us to Pisa where we could take another train back to Firenze. Little did we know that the trains were timed so that if we got on the wrong train, our two hour commute would be expanded to seven hours. Yes, you guessed it, we boarded a train to Sarzana and when we got off we were told that the next train to Pisa left in an hour and a half. That next train took us to Pisa where we waited another hour to board the last bus to Florence. At 3 a.m. we arrived at the Florence train station to discover that the local busses stopped running at 11 p.m. So our final leg was a sleepy haze of Italian taxi negotiation. Mamma mia! The silver lining brought our journey to an end in time to sleep until noon on a Sunday (if we had been required to go to class the following morning, there is no way we would have made it willingly).
Speaking of sleepy hazes, I think I will pull my little turtle head back into my shell and dream of a more successful journey home. Arrivederchi!
**A side note: Remember that saying that well-behaved women rarely make history? There is a popular (and global) notion that piercings, tattuigi and shaved-heads are all connected with badly-behaving women. First of all, I intend to make history (in a good way!), so this notion is not entirely bad news for me. However, my host-father told me at dinner last night (ieri sera) about his co-worker who had recently thrown a fit about his daughter getting inked with a small tattoo and how he had approached this man, telling him that his host-daughter (myself!) had two tattoos and many piercings and that I was one of the most polite and lovely host-daughters that he had hosted in his fifteen years of hosting international students. Hey, hey for international bragging rights!
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