Finally woke up to a cloudy day. We've had weeks and weeks of hot and sunny weather. It was a great relief to have clouds, a nice breeze and a lower temperature. A couple hours later we had a huge electrical storm. The Arno River was looking pretty low so I'm sure it was happy. A crazy thing happened as I watched the storm from the window. As I was standing there I heard some sort of cracking noise but didn't think much of it. About a minute later I screamed when I heard a huge smashing sound. The glass cover to our stove smashed into a million pieces. It happened just when there was a big bolt of lightening but I don't know if it had anything to do with that. It's more likely it exploded because I tried making coffee on top of the glass cover thinking it was made for that. I did it once before when we moved here but then only cooked directly on top of the burners. The glass of course heated up and then during the storm the air cooled just enough to make the entire glass shatter. Thank goodness it didn't shatter all over the place. It stayed right on the counter. Hardly one piece of glass made it to the floor. Anyway, I'm not sure if our landlord will believe lightening struck it. The storm let up, the sun came out and I decided to go see the most famous tower in the world. THE LEANING TOWER OF PISA. It's only about an hour away. Jonathan's leg is still bothering him so he's walking around on crutches so he decided to skip this trip. I quickly looked on line to check train times and chose the 1;57 becasue it stops at the station nearest the tower which ended up being stupid because this station was in the middle of nowhere and there were no signs. I recharged my camera battery, and ran off to the station.
After searching for the tower for about 45 minutes I finally came upon it. You would think the most famous tower in the world would have signs leading to it. NOTHING. Where I was walking around not one store or bar or anything was open. I knew it had to be somewhere because I saw it from the train window and I was in PISA after all!! Oh well, it was fun to find it this way. It was as if I was discovering it for the first time.
I don't know about you but when I see something as famous as the LEANING TOWER OF PISA I'm never impressed. I mean, how many times have I seen this thing? The amazing thing is- it's only famous becuase it LEANS. Just because they didn't realize how loose the soil was there is an international airport in this little town in the middle of nowehere!!! And it didn't take centuries for it to start leaning. It started sinking once they built the third floor. At one point it started leaning too much and they didn't let people into it so they spent millions of dollars to support the tower so it wouldn't fall over as tourists are climbing up it. Of course they spent millions to support the lean. What would have happened if they had totally straightened it out? Would more people have started coming to see the corrected tower or would it have been ignored? Hmm. It was a nice afternoon, not too hot, lots of grass and beautiful buildings. The tower really is the most uninteresting thing about this collection of buildings. I did want to go up it but they next available climbing was two hours later. Oh well.
Had a late lunch. Read a book and watched people go by on double tandem bikes. They were the thing to do for the tourists. Before going back home I decided to check out the historic area of town. I thought it was beautiful even though it doesn't have a great reputation. A big river runs through it with colorful buildings on either side. I just continued walking aroung until eventually I found the stazione centrale. The next train was in about 20 minutes. Had a nice ride home and went to Hong Kong for dinner with Jonathan.

I couldn't resist. Everyone else takes a picture of them holding up the building but NOT ME!