Weekend in Rome and Pisa!

I had a really great time this past weekend in and around Rome!  Friday my friends and I just stayed around campus for the day, catching up on school stuff (I did my student teaching application!) and just relaxing since everyone is still kind of sick.  On Saturday my friend Laura and I decided to take a day trip to Pisa.  It was a pretty spontaneous decision, we just went to the train station and bought our tickets that morning, I guess we were feeling adventurous!  I'm proud of us just for gettting there and back on the correct trains given the language barrier and everything.  It was a three hour train ride from Rome, and I loved traveling by train, since flying tends to give me anxiety.  I'll be very familiar with the trains by the end of the semester, since I have several future trips by train planned (one being to Salzburg, which is 11 hours each way!).  The train went along the Tyrrhenian Sea for a while, which was beautiful.  It was an overcast day and rained for part of the time we were in Pisa, but it was still a great trip.  The Leaning Tower of Pisa is really cool, it leans a lot!  On one side of it though, there is a cable that is definitely helping it stay up, which is kind of cheating, but it's still amazing it can stay up while leaning so much.  We paid to walk to the top of the tower, which meant walking up a few sections of very narrow steps.  At the top, we had great views of the city of Pisa, which is actually pretty small.  Then we went in the Duomo (church) that is right by the tower.  It's a huge church and the ceiling of half of the interior is made of incredibly detailed gold, it's beautiful.  Then we walked around Pisa a little more before getting back on a train headed home to Rome.  I'm so glad we decided to go because I don't know when else I would have had the chance to take a day trip to Pisa since just about all of my weekends in the future are booked with traveling.

Pisa

Laura and I on top of the Leaning Tower of Pisa

On Sunday my friends and I went to this giant outside flea market in Rome, Porta Portese, that's only open on Sundays.  There was a huge variety of products sold at the booths of this market.  They sold a ton of clothes and shoes, jewelry, makeup, perfume, random electronics such as alarm clocks, batteries, CDs, and even kitchen stuff such as pots and pans.  You could really buy just about anything there.  I couldn't help but think that half of the stuff being sold was somehow obtained illegally, because where would these people get large quantities of name brand things to sell at a flea market?  It seemed a little bit shady, but it was a very interesting place to go, that's for sure.  When we left the market, we walked around Rome for a while.  We climbed the stairs of this building that's called the "wedding cake building" since it looks like a multi-tiered white wedding cake from far away.  It's actually called the Vittorio Emanuele II Monument, built in honor of Victor Emmanuel, the first king of the unified Italy.  From the top of the building there are great views of the city.  We also saw these ruins called Torre Argentina, which is where Julius Caesar was supposedly killed.  Interestingly, there is a cat sanctuary located among the ruins now.  I don't think I've mentioned it in my previous posts, but there are a ton of homeless cats just wandering around Rome.  We actually have three or four that wander around campus all the time.  So in Torre Argentina volunteers come and take care of the cats that show up, it's like a no-kill shelter for the homeless cats of Rome, which I thought was very interesting.

Monument to Vittorio Emanuele II

View of the Colosseum from top of the Monument to Vittorio Emanuele II

The cat sanctuary among the ruins (there are 4 cats in this picture)

The ruins of Torre Argentina

So that was my adventurous weekend in Pisa and Rome.  This weekend I'm meeting one of my best friends, Elizabeth, in Barcelona, which will be so much fun!  I can't wait!  I'll update you all on Spain once I get back next week.  Thanks for reading!

Ciao,
Allison