We left Venice at about 6:30 pm and took two more long trains to Pisa. At this point Stacy was really sick from sun exposure. I actually had a sunburn so bad on my nose that I got a boil. We had no energy and got into Pisa at midnight, exhausted. At the hotel we had to climb 5 flights of stairs to get to our room. Stacy couldn't even make it. I took a much needed shower and we passed out. We had to wake up early and change hostels. We went to look for sunscreen. We ended up paying 15 euros for a 100ml bottle of sunscreen and that was the cheapest. We got it from a skin specialty store. Do supermarkets not carry sunscreen? We couldn't find any. So from then on I used the sunscreen like crazy.
Our second hostel owner's name was Giovanni and he was really cool. We knew origionally that there wasn't much to do in Pisa, but the way the trip worked out, we ened up spending three nights there. We figured it would be good because if there was nothing to do, we wouldn't feel like we were missing out on anything and we could just have a day to relax. Our first full day there, we, of course, saw the leaning tower. It's only at a 5 degree angle but it really looks like the tower is about to fall over! We also had amazing pizza in Pisa. Lame joke, but it's still funny.
The next day we took advantage of the free internet and decided to plan the rest of our trip. At this point, we had planned to go from Pisa to Rome. However, we expected to only spend five days in Rome, but at this point we still had 11 more days of our trip. We still can't figure out why our time schedule was off so much. We had to work it out with our two remaining travel days on our Eurail pass, though. It doesn't seem that difficult but it took us several different ideas before coming up with the final plan. I know because I emailed my parents about ten different times telling them each new plan. We decided to go to Naples because then we could go to the beach at Capri and see the ruins at Pompei and see Naples all in one stop. Then we would go to Rome for a week, which still seemed like too long.
We talked to Giovanni for a long time. He suggested we go to a bar nearby called Bazeel for dinner. He said they do happy hour by having drinks full price still, but they have a buffet. Well he somewhat exagerated about the buffet, after all it was free. We went and had a drink. The buffet had six rice and noodle dishes. They also had pizza and cheeses. For the 3 euro price of a drink, I had several small plates of food.
Now this entire trip Jan has been going off about motorcycle racing which he and his friends are in to. But it's not big in the U.S., apparently it's huge in Italy though. Valentino Rossi is one of the biggest superstars of all time. Well a race Jan wanted to watch the previous day came on TV at the bar. Turns out that it was cancelled due to weather and was on tonight. While watching, he told us about the sport. I learned something new. In addition, there is nothing more real than watching an Italian superstar in an Italian bar in Italy, and then going to get gelato. I liked this because it was more of a local thing rather than touristy. We were hanging out with the Italians watching the race. We slept like rocks that night.
We got up and got on the train to Naples in the morning.
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