Once again, we got up early to catch our next connection, an hour-long train ride to Pisa. This was a quick stop, as the only thing we cared about seeing here was the Leaning Tower, of course. We weren’t sure where to go and the map at the train station was somewhat misleading, but we followed the signs and made it there just fine. The tower was fantastic! We loved it. It’s actually smaller than you might think it would be (is that the way everything is here? I wonder sometimes), but so pretty! The cathedral behind it was gorgeous as well, but we were too distracted by the Tower to notice. We had a grand old time taking funny pictures of ourselves “holding up” the Tower, and other such things. Once we’d had our fill of that, it was time to walk back to the station, grab some lunch, and get onto our next train, heading for Cinque Terre. In all, we spent a grand total of about two hours in Pisa. Definitely my fastest city-visit yet!
The ride to Cinque Terre was a series of long tunnels and ear-popping, but overall not too bad. And when the gaps in the tunnels started giving me split-second views of rocky shore and turquoise water, I wanted to start jumping up and down or shrieking or some equally un-Kristen-like display of excitement. Somehow I managed to restrain myself, but the sea/ocean never fails to make me ecstatic!
I feel like I’ve explained what Cinque Terre is a million times, but I don’t remember if I did so on here or not yet. So if I have, just skip ahead. Anyway, it’s a group of five smallish towns on the western coast of Italy, and you can hike between them and such. The town we visited was called Levanto, and it was wonderful! It was so nice to be in a place that didn’t have jillions of people everywhere, forcing one to shove through the crowd to get anywhere. For some reason, it had a similar feeling for me as being in Joliet, Montana. If Joliet were on the Mediterranean Sea. With exotic-looking houses. The atmosphere was just very relaxing, and there was so much natural beauty everywhere! I feel like we don’t always get a lot of that here.
Once we got off the train, the first thing we did was find the beach! We then proceeded to change into our bikinis (Yes, you heard me right. I have now been more exposed in public than I have ever been O.o) and stayed on the beach for the rest of the afternoon! We soaked in the sun (I didn’t get very tan, though, because I covered myself copiously in the rather expensive sunscreen I had thankfully bought in Florence – being sunburned that night would’ve been unimaginably awful, and you’ll soon see why), got covered by rocky sand, waded in the freezing yet refreshing water, and took in the general splendor as the afternoon grew slowly. Megan introduced me to the wonderfulness that is the music of Tyrone Wells, and we all watched the antics of the most adorable little Italian boy ever, who was hanging out nearby us with his equally adorable family. Later on, Megan and I walked down the beach a bit and through a couple of the (freezing!) tunnels down the road. The scenery was AMAZING – definitely high on my top-ten list of Beautiful Places Kristen Has Seen. Lots of rocky hills with pretty houses on them, and water that was actually blue – not just reflecting the sun so that it looks blue; no, it was really and truly blue! I’ve never seen anything like it. And while Megan and I watched the water, we saw some animals jumping around a ways off, and there was something moving around in the water quite close to us! It was still too far to see what it was, and the thing refused to jump out and show itself, but we decided it was a whale. We wanted it to be, at least. Does the Mediterranean Sea have whales in it? I don’t know, but it was cool. And gosh, I can’t say enough about how gorgeous the place was. I would so love to go back someday!
After a few gorgeous hours on the Levanto shore, sunset had arrived and it was time to head back to the train station, as our train to Venice was leaving at 8:30 p.m. We stopped to pick up some sustenance at a grocery store on the way back, since we knew that we had a very long night ahead of us. To save money once again, we decided not to stay the night in Cinque Terre and instead go straight on to Venice that night. We knew it would be rough, but again, you just have to make the best of it sometimes. It wouldn’t have been quite so bad if we could have taken a direct train, but unfortunately, Levanto is small enough that the guy at the ticket office gave us a funny look when we told him we wanted tickets for Venice. We explained to him that we knew it wasn’t direct, but we didn’t quite realize what this would mean at the time. Our first connection was from Levanto to Parma, where we arrived at a bit after 11:00. Next up was Parma to Bologna.
By then it was about 1:00. Unfortunately, we had to wait until 3:00 for our final connection to Venice, which was exceedingly unpleasant. Thankfully, there was an indoor waiting-room (which the Parma station hadn’t had, and neither had a bathroom that didn’t cost money to use – how is this not illegal?? I miss that about the States – here, you can’t always pee for free!), though we were still very cold because we had that after-nap feeling of being deeply chilled even though the weather was only a bit brisk. And there were very few people in the room that weren’t skeezy-looking men, which was quite unnerving. But we stuck together and were okay. After two very long hours, it was finally time for our train to leave. We found our compartment, which had some weird old lady in it who wouldn’t take her feet off of one of the seats we were supposed to have (thankfully, one of the men in our compartment left and then there was enough room), and which was very dark and stuffy. It was approximately 2 hours until we would arrive in Venice, so we settled in and tried to sleep a little. We had moderate success, but it wasn’t nearly enough.
At around 5:15, I woke up, used the nasty train bathroom because I didn’t know how long it would be until I’d find another one (at this point, it had been about 48 hours since we’d seen a bathroom with toilet paper in it…thank goodness for Kleenex. What I would have given for a clean bathroom with toilet paper and soap…), got my stuff together, and got ready to get off. We waited until the train station that was on the main island so that we would only have to pay for one transport to the mainland instead of two.
And so, after a long, difficult night, we were finally there! Even though the ride had been unpleasant, however, we just had to remind ourselves that it had meant we could spend half the day in Cinque Terre, and we knew that it had all been worth it.
Final chapter – Venice!
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