No, I wasn’t going to update my blog on my birthday!!! But, K and I did have a wonderful day on the Tuscan coast in the Florentine get-away of Viareggio. We woke up rather early in the morning (hey, when you don’t have class before 10 am, being up with the sun is strange!) to try and catch the 9am train… well, in the US, I’m more than comfortable with my ability to navigate train stations, airports, and the like… I mean, really, it’s all about reading the signs… nothing complicated… no, I am not saying that this accounts for my more than abominable sense of direction when behind the wheel… but, when on foot, I pride myself on my rather formidable sense of direction… look, I’ve been living in Florence for almost two weeks, and can basically avoid pulling out the tourist flag and mapping my way home!!!
Allora… I diverge :)
So, once we made it to the train station, K and I bought our tickets at the easy, self-serve ticket booths (reminding me, in a moment of pure nostalgia, of buying a Charlie card at home…) nothing catastrophic there… save our slight confusion about euro to dollar conversion (always checking the finances…) So, with schedule in hand (printed from school, so as to avoid any unnecessary confusion… heh.) we marched to the hanging signs with times and places flashing across them… and we waited… we saw Viareggio appear, walked to the appropriate track, waited, saw people get on, and then the most annoying thing happened… the train just left! No one got on, and trust me, after getting knocked over by several hurried Florentines, one of us would have noticed a rush to the train… but no, it just left. Being the travel-savvy , and slightly annoyed, 20-somethings we are, we finally mustered up the tourist courage to ask for help… turns out… trains come from Viareggio, and yet, depart for Pistoia… we were looking in vain for a departure that would never occur… but made our way to the appropriate track and made it beach-side by noon.
Finally, something I have no doubt about, the beach! Wrong again! When visiting the sea-side in Tuscany, one must first realize that without a hotel reservation, you’re stuck on a 5’-7’ strip of land literally abutting the jetty… something I have no problem with, except for the fact that that miniscule strip of land is already inhabited by several Italians in spedos… something neither K nor I fancied on asking to move… luckily, we played the dumb American girls (really, we didn’t play, because we had to be told not to sit in the cabanas lining the shore before knowing that we couldn’t actually sit there… :D) and just put our towels down in a cabana.
We started to take a few pictures, and were greeted by a cute lifeguard asking if we’d like him to take our picture. Rather than be rude, and run the risk of being kicked to the more-than-crowded-strip of public beach, we smiled, said yes, and made awkward conversation until he left, and we could at last, enjoy the sun, the sand, and silence.
We had the chance later, after realizing that my over-sun blocked-self was burning, despite my best intentions, to walk along the shore, just enjoying the sights… This was a first for me, mountains and ocean??? Talk about heaven!! (K, being from Oregon, was more shocked by the warm temperature and lack of rain that went along with the two sights to which she was already so accustomed…)
Honestly, what better way to spend a day than looking at this for hours on end, with gelato in hand?
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