Italy Day 1-Eindhoven to Pisa to Florence

I don't remember what time I woke up but I managed to get down to the meeting place at the meeting time. I wanted to take my blue backpack but it was too big to fit into ryanair's restrictions :( I had to bring my black bag instead. I brought my reversible pants and a few tees for the trip! And I met up with the others behind my place and I got my first state of the GPS capabilities of a jailbroken iphone! it was cool! And Jiang Heng's Nokia GPS was superb too! I really cold use one of those things! but now, I had to stick to maps and stuff :(

Once we reached the bus interchange at central station, we waited for the bus as I started to munch on my bread. I had milk at home ald. We were supposed to meet Kai Hee and Azri at the interchage, but they were no where to be seen till the first bus to the airport we planned to take was about to leave. We decided to take it anyway :P

And the bus driver let us stamp the thing ourselves! hahha! Johnny, sharing tic with JH stamped 8 slots, as he should. the rest of us stamped less than that, with me travelling at the cheapest rate, at just 2 stamps! yay!
Later, we found out that those 2 managed to take a bus that left after ours :D After getting to the airport, we waited for KH and Azri:

And to my surprise, I wasn't the one who paid the least for my bus ride anymore! Those 2 had travelled for FREE since the machine was spoiled! oh man.. I should have joined them! argh! hahah! anyway, we had to wait till 8am for the flight gate to open. I was really thirsty and I had to throw away my water bottle at security. So, I bought a bottle for S$3 before boarding:( Later, I discovered that I had bought 'sparkling water' and it tasted really bad!

Look! a man dressed in costume boarded the plane too! hahah!

And we said ta-ta to Eindhoven Airport!

Along the way, I managed to take a shot of the swiss alps as we flew over them:

And as expected by the weather forecast, it was drizzling as we landed in pisa! From the airport, we walked to the train station with the aid of the 2 GPS people among us. It was about 1.5 km away!

And on our way to the LEANING TOWER, we passed by a river!

I was amazed at how clean the river was! It didn't smell at all! Maybe it's because it's winter. And it was a comfortable 10 degrees there! And as we walked on and on, the leaning tower emerged from the buildings!

After taking a few pics of it, we went to walk around the place to explore. We found this souvenir shop and a row of souvenir shops outside! Great place to buy back stuff for my frens back in s'pore! hahah, I'm not gonna say what i bought here, it's supposed to be a surprise!
And it costs 15 euros to go up! We decided that It wasn't really worth it and took photos around the place instead. and the birds there came really close to me! look, i took this!!

more pics of the place on the facebook album!
After Azri couldn't take his hunger anymore, we went over to find a pizza place. They were all over the place! hahah, we went into this Restorante Bar Europeo! I liked the place's interior:

As 2 of us ordered water, the waitress brought water n this container that looked like those used in labs to hold chemicals! hahah! here is Fong Chi pouring some Hydrogen peroxide on a glass!

And we were given complimentary bread with our meal. It was terrible! the worst non-stale bread i've ever tasted! it was super hard and chewy. Everyone of us had a taste of it though :P
And finally, my Vegetariana pizza come along!

Yes, to those of you who are wondering, I ate the WHOLE pizza! I was super full at the end of it! I'm glad we took a walk around to burn off some of the calories. We went over to a museum, then just walked along the river... and there was this vending machine for cigarettes that had a slot for ppl to insert their identity cards:

A fancy shot of Azri and Kai hee along one of the passage ways:

you can see that it's in black and white. why? cos the weather wasn't nice for color pics! Azri came up with this idea and i noted that his pics were awesome and so I started taking in B & W too!
Another thing worth noticing in Pisa is this awesome church. If you walk from the airport/train station to the leaning tower, it's difficult to miss it:

As there was nothing much to see in Pisa, we hoped onto a train and made our way to florence! haha! JH, KH and me were at the counter trying to sound italian in our english when buying the train tics! We were so bored along the way that we started guessing the number of stops left and counting them! We counted to 15! Johnny was right :D
Here is KH trying to form the italian flag with her clothes:green sweater, white pants, red jacket!

And walking to the hostel (Danny's house) was terrible! It was raining when we got to Florence! We went over to a supermarket nearby to buy water bottles for ourselves and started out. I had seen the map before but didn't save it/print it out :( argh, i was so dumb! Jiang Heng's nokia GPS was really good in giving directions! We finally managed to reach the place:

And I made a new friend, Melissa! Say hi to her, everyone:

And the hostel owner was really nice to us: He gave us a map of the nice places to visit in Florence, marked them out, made us an extra key and we were gonna have breakfast for 2 euros the next morning! But we needed to settle our dinner for that day. So, I went over to him to ask for a good place to eat. After getting the directions, we started walking to that place. We saw a lot of nice buildings along the way but it was too dark to take any pics. We reached the place after about 30 minutes of walking. And I had this soup with pasta and beans. Try it if you want something other than pizza/pasta! It tasted great:

And then, we walked allll the way back! Some of us went to bathe while I went to bed-I'm a morning bather! wow! Lots of stuff on this day.. this post is 1142 words long!