Florence, Day 3

Very long day. Today we had a day trip to Siena, San Gimignano, and Pisa with lunch and a wine tasting included. We got up around 0630 so that we could leave the hostel by 0700 to make our meeting point in time (had to be there by 0725). After checking in and waiting a bit, we were finally able to board our bus that had our colour sticker. We were a spanish/English bus which was fine. Couldn’t understand the tour guide too much when she spoke English, but thankfully when she repeated everything in Spanish afterwards I knew what she was saying. Our first stop was in Siena. We were supposed to have 2 hours in total here but we were cut to 1.5 since the bus left late due to people showing up to the meeting point late. We got a tour of the Siena Cathedral and even got to see some original, untouched paintings from the 1400s. Then we found my beloved postcards and headed back to our meeting point. We were originally told that we had to be on time to meeting points and were given a 5 minute grace period before we were to leave without people and they could call the number on the stickers given to us in order to contact the company and go from there. Our tour guide was the only one not to follow this, and therefore we left 45 minutes late and we got to lunch very late. Due to being late to lunch, our pasta was cold when it finally got served which kind of sucked. The wine tasting was fine, had a few good wines in the mix from one of the Tuscany farms. Then we went to San Gimignano where we were supposed to have 1.5 hours and we had about 50 minutes due to time constraints. This really sucked, but we were able to get through the torture museum, a witchcraft museum, and take a look at a local leather shop. We met back at our meeting point on time with the rest of group and was once again left waiting (same people from the first stop) as they came around 25 minutes late. We were all pretty mad and we weren’t that quiet about it. We headed towards Pisa (supposed to be 1.5 hours, only got 35 minutes) where we took pictures of the 2 monuments and the Pisa tower (we did not do any illusion pictures; I felt it was a bit cliché). It was very underwhelming and there isn’t anything around the Pisa Tower other than just the tower. We unfortunately did not have time to even climb it due to the poor time constraints due to the rude couple that thinks the world revolves around them (no, they were not disabled or anything that could understandably cause them to be slower. They’re just rude). This time we were only left waiting an extra 10 minutes on this couple before leaving for Pisa and getting back a bit later than originally planned. Other than the crappy amount of time we were actually able to spend at all the spots, the scenery was beautiful and it was nice to get away from the super touristy areas of Italy for the day and see some of the countryside. Tomorrow we head out early for our one and only beach day in Cinque Terre. Italy is almost done, but it doesn’t seem like it yet!