Tenth week in Italy
Noora had bought new jogging shoes just the previous day, so naturally Siru would need some, too. She had borrowed Marta’s old shoes, but they were a bit too big. We returned to Valdichiana and swore to ourselves we wouldn’t visit it this often – 3 times in just 2 days. Naturally they had to be tried out, too. On Tuesday we had a rest from jogging and went swimming instead and on Wednesday we were on the track again. Usually we don’t have the time or we’re just too tired to make a proper meal, but we made a really nice lunch with salad and dressing, steaks, sage potatoes and red wine sauce. The sauce didn’t turn out to be so good, but we were still proud of ourselves – we hadn’t gone back to pasta meals we ate for the first couple weeks, or the truth be told, the first month. Siru was especially happy to eat a piece of real meat instead of veggies or minced meat.
As Tiia’s birthday was coming up we decided to celebrate it by taking her and her two Finnish friends to an outdoor disco La Signoria in Sinalunga. The disco was crowded with people and it was hard to dance due to the lack of space. The night out was nice even though the parking system sucked and we still think that La Villa is way better place – but the most important thing is that Tiia had fun.
In the morning, after three hours of sleep, we went to work. Mauro had two wine tastings coming up so we helped him with slicing the zucchini and frying it – spinning blades and hot stoves woke us up pretty quickly. The working day, as long as it was, went well, but when we got home we slowly started losing it. We had planned to go to Pisa on Sunday, so we would have to shower in the evening and as our dear neighbor cut the grass in front of our apartment we wanted to thank him by making apple-cinnamon pancake. As good as our plan sounded, it didn’t go so well. We made the dough alright, and left it on the stove to sit as we would grab a quick ice cream from Foiano and pizza from Pozzo. When we finally got back ready to go to bed we remembered the dough and the shower. Siru started to prepare the pancake while Noora tried to hurry with the shower. Halfway through baking it in the oven we realized that when it comes out it would already be late and that the pancake would be hot. In the end we just wrapped the pancake in foil and put it in a free shelf in the fridge.
Siru decided to shower first thing in the morning so we didn’t get to sleep so late. We were in a bit of a hurry and ended up having the breakfast in the train. When we got to our destination we naturally headed for the leaning tower of Pisa and we were quite surprised how small it eventually was, at least compared to tower of Puijo in Kuopio. We found it also surprising that in Pisa there were not so many tourists, taken how big a thing the phenomenal tower is around the world, but as we we found out there wasn’t really much to see besides it. The canal we crossed was even dirtier than in Venice, if possible, and scenery looked rather depressing. We went to practically every shop in the tourist district, visited a museum with old statues and artifacts and would have gotten the chance to get familiar with some church, too, since a Polish homeless guy would have wanted to marry Noora. Probably needless to say that we had to pass on the honour.
