Italy Day 4: Cinque Terre to Pisa

19th feb: The morning was terrible... I had slept at about 330am that night and was supposed to wake up at 530. But when I opened my eyes and pressed the light button on my watch, it said 629!! oppss.. I panicked and got out of bed and that was when FC's alarm went off! She got up and went to brush her teeth. I then took the bathroom to brush, shower and get ready for the day. The toilet was great! Just a bit cold, as usual. I wonder if any of the european toilets have those warmers on the toilet bowl seats like the japanese ones do. And it was raining too! After having or breakfast, we waited for the rain to settle down. We were supposed to check out by 10 but the office only opens at 1030! hahah, We checked out from the place at 845 to explore first. The plan was to later come back to the office and formally check out. First stop, we went to the port below our place. Fantastic place! It was so close to the waves!

After that, we started climbing to the top of the cliff. It was really tiring climb, especially with bags. Luckily, Pau helped Kai Hee with her bag. All this time, it was drizzling too! But anytime during the climb, we can stop, look back and feel motivated cos of the view:

haha! Noww you can see what I meant in my post yesterday.. That the entire city is built on a cliff! Now imagine the streets, roads and street names and stuff! And you have Cinque Terre! Now Cinque Terre is a big place, with 5 such cities. I was in Rio Maggiore, the first one.

And with ~65% of our way up, we got too tired to climb. The clock was ticking for us to check out and pay too. Since it was almost impossible for everybody to make it down so fast, we changed the plan a bit: Jiang Heng, Pau and me would go down the way we came up and check out while the rest go down using the road (a longer but safer way).

The rain got heavier as we went down. My winter jacket was dripping wet and my hat was really dripping! With all that, we took a detour and reached the place super fast! We were there ~ 20 mins early! So, we went to buy chocolate powder and milk to refresh ourselves. We then went back to the hostel and made 1 litre of chocolate milk!!

It was quite a lot for the 3 of us, but yea, I'm a milk drinker and so, i drank 2 and 1/2 cups :D

And we purposely took pics of ourselves to make the other jealous :)

When we went down again at 1045, the office was still closed! So, we decided to write a note and place the keys inside the keybox, which was what some other stayer had done:

When we went down to the train station, the others were already there! hahah, we showed them the pics of the chocolate drink. Later, we found out that there was a strike till 2pm so, we couldn't take the train yet. And it was too rainy to walk to the next city, although that was possible. So, we decided to find a place for lunch. After lunch, we waited till about 2 and set off to Carniglia. I think it was 3 cities down.

We had split ourselves into pairs to share umbrellas: JH & FC, Pau & Johnny, Azri & saba, KH and me. We went up the cliff to a look out point in a town to take pics!

And we found out that the ticket we had bought earlier on allowed us to board a bus that'll bring us back to the station. We then went to another station! I forgot what this one was called, but it had a beach in it:

We took a few pics there before that area got cordoned off due to a sea storm :(

After that, we came back to Manorola station, which was one station away from our place. We decided to experience the sunset there! So, here are the best of the sunset pics:

At around this time, we were looking for the sun which was supposedly being covered by the clouds. And all of a sudden, boom! it popped up, resulting in this beautiful pic:

And this:

And as it went down even further, the colors changed slightly:

And I tried to capture a bird flying over the sunset since there were several of them them came out to fly around, but a lot of my pics were blur. Here is one of the better ones:

And I took a emo-ing pic of myself :)

After that, we made our way to the Rio Maggiore station using several lights, since the place was getting dark. We then took a train to another station (which I forgot the name of) and found a place to eat.

And this was my last meal in Italy!

When we went back to the station to take a train down to La Spezia and another connecting train to Pisa, we couldn't operate the ticket machines. So, we just boarded the train and took it down to La Spezia! Fortunately, there were nobody to check on us :D We then bought a ticket and took a train down to Pisa Centrale. We walked to the airport from that station. The plan was to sleep at the airport will our flight at 8am the next morning. But I felt too adventurous to let my hair down and sleep. So, I decided to go explore the place. Walk around a bit! Since I was going out alone, Jiang Heng lent me his hp which had GPS navigation system :D At first, i went over to the right hand side of the airport, but there were only expressways there :( Then, i went over to the left side to the Pisa airporto stazione:

And I went into the road by the stazione, but nah.. nothing interesting to see there:

At that time, i decided to come at the airport and join the others, declaring that Pisa was a boring place. But that was when an idea struck my brain- Why don't i go down to check out the leaning tower at night? yea! great idea! So, that's what i did :D I knew how to get to the train station without the map, but I needed the GPS system to get me from there. And I came to the river that we were at on our first day in Pisa. It looked great at night:

And then, I accidentally took a wrong street from the river but yea the GPS system corrected for it and navigated me to the tower in a slightly longer route. This was also because I was just learning how to operate his hp! not easy hor! It was all in chinese :P
When i finally got to the place, the entrance was locked :( But there were a few ppl taking pics on the outside, since the tower was visible. I was about to do the same when I saw some ppl (who were clearly tourists) walking about on the other side of the door. Then, I saw some people climbing one of the shorter gates! And then, this guy came up with a iron rod and asked everybody to move away. He inserted the rod into the lock, pivoted it on the door and used his weight to break the lock! wow! And those outside just rushed in! On the other hand, I was quite surprised that a lock that was half the size of my ipod Touch was used to lock the gate of one of the world's 7 wonders. Now that's a wonder by itself!

So, here are the pics of the tower: Nothing special, just that it was night time :D

And I took this pic of the closed souvenir shops:

And as I was about to go back using the route we took on the first day, I found another gate-locking wonder:

Although this gate was locked, one can easily come in through the construction site's sheltered pathway. Anyway, my bat died with that photo and the other pics are in JH's phone! I'll get them later...And I made it back to the airport 1 hour earlier than I said I would :) But when I got there, it was locked! I then went to look at the train station to see if my friends were there. And yes, they were! everyone except Jiang Heng and Kai Hee. Poor thing, they got kicked out of the airport and still had about 1.5 hrs before it opened back again. Also, since these peeps have not been moving around much, they were coldd! yes! When I found out that JH and iHee had gone out looking for me, I wanted to go get them. But Johnny and FC had gone to the river to take pics (after seeing my pics :D) and azri thought that there would be too few ppl looking after the bags if I left. So, I stayed! After about 30 mins, I started feeling cold too! The wind was blowing now and then to make it worse. Terrible! The four of us got into a penguin formation to trap out body heat. It's standing shoulder to shoulder in a square, with arms on each other. It was effective, especially with Pau's lighter in the middle! hahah! The group of asian students near us should have thought that we were crazy!! Cos just a few minutes ago, Azri was carrying 2 big bags to try to keep himself warm, I was doing funny exercises on the bench as we took turns to run up and down the station! It was hilarious! Yea.. And after sometime, Johnny and FC came back and I was starting to worry from JH and iHee. I had earlier told JH that i would be exploring the left side of the airport. That part was just expressways. And JH's GPS phone was with mee :(
Anyway, we walked into the airport when it opened to warm ourselves up! Finally! And as we were walking in, I spotted iHee and JH :D yay! They had actually given up on looking for and and stumbled on a super ex cafe where iHee had a lousy croissant:
KH: Oh, le me tell you guys about my lousy croissant..
one of us: WOW! You had a CROISSANT!!??
hahah! it was ex though, so ex that she was reluctant to tell me the price at first. I think the croissant together with some hot drink costed her 6 euros or sth.. So late in the night what..

Anyway, I used the power plug in the airport to charge my camera battery for ~30mins. The check-in places opened after that and we went up to the boarding area. And slept. yes! I slept too, since i couldn't stand my sleepiness anymore! iHee and I woke up earlier but for some reason, ended up queuing way behind the others! hahah! There weren't too many ppl infront though... We all finally found a comfortable seat to travel back home to Eindhoven.

And for the record, this post is 1891 words long!