Livorno & Pisa

The ship docked in Livorno early this morning. We woke up to a wet and drizzly dawn and it pretty much stayed that way all day.

The first thing we did was to catch the train out of Livorno to Pisa, where we did the tourist thing. The leaning tower is definitely a sight to behold. Pictures do not do it justice, and I was suitable awed. Definitely worth the visit. The Duomo (cathedral) was also very interesting and worth the price of admission. It's a bit harder to say the same for the Baptistry, although seeing (or more accurately, listening) to the acoustics demonstration was nice. As for the Campo Santo (cemetery), in its current state of repair/renovation, it is eminently skippable unless you're a real fan of tombstones and sarcophagi.

A minor disaster occured at the top of the leaning tower of Pisa -- the battery in our camera died. Jeanne had bought a new camera (the Canon PowerShot SD700IS) for my mom and no one thought to charge it up the night before... Incidentally, this little camera has been absolutely terrific so far.

From Pisa we went to Lucca and wandered around its old, twisty streets and plazas, sticking our heads into the odd church or musuem that were scattered about. Unfortunatly, we only had about 90 minutes to spend here since we'd taken our time in Pisa and had to get back to the ship by 5:30pm. Nevertheless, my mom and George loved it. While Pisa might have the more spectacular attraction, they prefered the Lucca's ambience.

I learned a three unexpected (and disappointing) things today:

1. There's grafitti everywhere. And I do mean everywhere, which detracted from the sights.
2. Italians are serious about their siestas. Except for the stores selling tourist souvenirs, almost all other stores are only open from about 9am-1pm and 4pm-8pm. Since we have to get back to the ship by around 6pm or 7pm, that basically means we've got to do any shopping we want to do between 9am-1pm, and we're usually focused on seeing the sites first so shopping is pretty much not an option.
3. There's a feeling of getting nickle and dimed at some of the attractions. The worst example of this is at one church where they had lights set up to illuminate the paintings on the walls. The catch? You had to pay to turn the light on!
4. I am not a big fan of the time limitations we have to operate in due to the cruise format. We basically have nine hours (plus or minus an hour depending on the port) to look around, and if we want to travel out of the town we docked in, that really doesn't give me as much time to sight see. It's a constant struggle deciding between quantity or quality, and it can get quite stressful the close it gets to the departure time.

By the time we'd gotten back to the ship, we were all bone tired and immediately hopped on to the hot tub/steam room/sauna circuit. Bliiisssss...

Go directly to bed. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200.