We are in Florence! We arrived late Tuesday afternoon and checked in to our hostel before searching for some dinner. There is a panini shop across the street as well as a bakery so now we've had two nights in a row of sandwiches and canolis, but that's ok because they are pretty delicious! We got up early yesterday morning to catch a train for a day trip to Pisa.
There are two train station in Florence and our hostel is near the slightly smaller one. We bought tickets from ours because it was a much closer walk, but saw that we had to change trains at the larger station. When we arrived our train was 5 minutes late, and with only 11 minutes to change trains, we ran all the way from platform 18 to platform 1. It was crazy! It took me quite a while to recover from all that running, but we had an hour and a half train ride to sit, and we enjoyed the views of the Italian countryside rushing by.
We arrived in Pisa and walked all the way from the train station to the tower. Pisa seemed much more typical-Italy as we had imagined it and it was very nice to walk through. We came to the tower, took some photos, and went up on a small tour. Luckily it's low season here so it wasn't too busy. Since that's about the only thing to do in Pisa, we got some lunch afterwards and then headed back to the train station to come back to Florence. We had circled some interesting places on the map before leaving and actually managed to see most of them! This included Brunelleschi's Dome, the Ponte Vecchio bridge, and the Michaelangelo plaza where you can look out over the whole city. We ended our second night with more paninis, canolis, and a movie.
