So a week or two ago, I fought tooth and nail to be able to buy a ticket on this Carnival trip that EAP put together. For a mere 150euro, they transported us to three locations, put us in a hotel for a night, provided two multi-course meals, and got us entry into some interesting places.



We left Saturday morning, very early for Lucca. What can I say about Lucca? Well, it was raining. Lucca is one happening place. The excitement never ends. How can I describe this to you... let's see.... oh I know! Lucca is about as exciting as an ugly pet rock that you got from some asshole friend in a really pretty box [for those of you who are still working on understanding my humor, that translates into: Lucca fucking sucks].

We had about an hour or so to wander around in this sad little place, without any background on what was so special about Lucca, besides that it's supposedly some hidden gem of a Medieval town. Anyway, nothing was open, and you could walk from one end of town to the other in five minutes. The only exciting thing was that were was a carousel in one of the piazze, but it was closed because of the rain. They did, however, feed us a nice hefty 3 or 4 course meal.

I just typed about a hundred words too many on the subject. Moving on...



Our excursions in Lucca were so overwhelming that we all slept on the bus ride to Pisa. Pisa was pretty unimpressive, and for a little while I was almost convinced that the leaning tower was an urban legend. But then we turn a corner and went under a bridge and there it was, about half as big and twice as leaning as we all expected. We a couple hours to explore Pisa [read: the Piazza that the Duomo and tower are in]. So of course we all spent the first hour competing to see who could look like the biggest douchebag trying to take a picture of themselves holding up the tower or pushing it over or sitting on it or in some cases, pretending like it was a very flattering part of the male anatomy.

We were divided into two groups to go up into the tower, and I was in the latter group with Mike, so we walked around the piazza, and after those five minutes were burned up, went on a trek to find the restrooms, which turned out not only to take longer and be much more challenging, but also to cost me 0,30euro. Those Pisa bastards are tricky folk. After my costly pee, we took a closer look at the venders lined up along one side of the piazza, who sold pretty much every single thing you could possibly shape like a leaning tower, including but not limited to: leaning espresso cups, leaning mugs, leaning flasks, leaning nightlights, leaning lightsabers, leaning keychains, leaning posters, leaning kitchen aprons, leaning magnets, and leaning sculptures. We stopped in a Bar to buy Mike a leaning cappuccino, and then met up with the rest of the group for our tour of the tower.

First of all, you're not allowed to take anything up into the tower except a camera. You have to check all of your belongings into these electronically locking lockers, which took way longer than it should take 25 people to put a bag in a box, but whatever. Then you get to go to the top of the tower. Let me summarize my feelings about this experience for you: the leaning tower of Pisa is the worst invention EVER.

Maybe I was just being naive, but I was totally unprepared for the task I was about to take on. The tower really looks much smaller than you'd expect, but when you're climbing an increasingly narrow, windowless, handrail-less, airless spiral staircase that seems to never end, when you're dizzy and nauseas from going in circles at an angle and your thighs and butt are burning from the three billion steps you've already gone up and you think you're going to pass out, it really seems to exponentially expand in size.

I did make it to the top, and panting, I gratefully went up the last stair and looked around. For someone not afraid of heights, I was fairly nervous. When you come out of those stairs, the level that you're on isn't actually flat. The tower is circular, and on the top there's a raised platform with bells on it, and then stairs descending around it, like concentric circles. It's pretty scary to not have level ground to walk on. Not to mention that you're at a pretty sharp angle. It was quite a view, though, I have to give them that. We discovered that you could actually go up one more level on top of the belled platform in this ridiculously narrow staircase, and so we figured we might as well. At least that level was flat. It started to rain pretty much as soon as we got up there, which made it all the more scary because the entire thing is made of slippery marble. I forgot to say that all the stairs have serious one to two inch dips in them from years and years of millions of people going up and down every day. So factor together the height, the angle, the very smooth slipper marble, the rain, and the nausea, and boy you're got a good time. Going down was actually worse than going up, mostly because of the dizzy/slippery wet stairs/trying not to fall to my death/eyesight getting screwy because of going around on circles thing. I was less than a happy camper when we made it down, and even though it was cold and raining, I stripped down to my shirt because I felt to suffy and nauseas. Then it was back to the bus and on our way to Viareggio.

We arrived in Viareggio around 6pm, checked into our hotel, got our room assignments and keys, and were left to find ourselves dinner. They kind of lied to us in that we weren't really in Viareggio, we were on the outskirts where there's nothing to do and nowhere to go. But we were actually right on the beach [not that we saw it at night], so it was far better than Lucca. It was a difficult task to find dinner. There were very few restaurants and the ones we stopped by were too expensive. There were no open supermarkets, either. We finally found this pretty big restaurant that was just opening for dinner that had margherita pizzas for 4,50euro each, so pizza it was. We ended up taking over three tables, and we were the only people in the place, so the cooks and waitstaff were really nice to us. The chefs saw us dancing to the music they were playing so they turned it up real loud and that was fun. The pizza was delicious - very similar to the pizza place across the piazza from our apartment in Rome - very thin crust, very little sauce, a little cheese - delicious. Most of us got beer or wine and our own pizzas and were quite satisfied. Some other friends who had no luck finding a restaurant in the opposite direction met up with us, so it was a fun meal. My table in particular invented some new drinking games involving a salt shaker, a pack of sugar, and wind. Don't ask [I wasn't drinking because I was still sick from my illness and from Pisa, but I still had fun].

Everyone went back to the hotel, where most got ready to go out and look for a discoteque or party or something. My roommate Sasha [who was not my roommate at the hotel] stayed in with me, and we ended up talking the night away while everyone else found this enormous Carnival festival a couple kilometers away, where the night was much more eventful. My sources say this festival was like Halloween in IV times 5 on acid. I was glad I didn't go.

Mike's housemate Mike [yes there are two Mikes] went out, got drunk, then hitchiked back to the hotel where he was locked out. His room was on the fourth floor but somehow, after chucking rocks at the wrong window, he decided it would be a good idea to scale the wall by stacking tables on top of each other, stepping up on a floodlight onto a balcony on the first floor. He then walked into some random woman's hotel room, freaked the hell out of her, jumped off the balcony, and snuck into the hotel through some back kitchen room or something. He ended up having to pay a fine for security damages or some such things. Kids these days. They never remember to bring their rocketship shoes anywhere.



Wow, this is the longest blog post ever, and I'm not even on Sunday yet... sorry about that. So let's do Sunday:

JK. Because this post is so long I'm going to break it up into a couple parts. And Flickr is down [damnit, Yahoo!] so I can't post new pictures. And I've had to retype this part three times now because Blogger isn't saving my edits. What is going on, internet?! I apologize if there are a lot of mistakes that need correcting. I'll try again later. Poop.