Italy day 2 - Pisa

Here we are in day two of our trip to Italy. It was nice to get some rest last night, although I'm sure Dom and Hil enjoyed getting some solid sleep without anyone little ones waking them up in the middle of the night!

Wendy and I slept in a bit, as we were still adjusting to the time change. I brought Daisy downstairs while mommy was still getting ready. Below are a couple of pictures of Dom and Daisy, making 'touchdown' symbols with her arms.

I love this picture. Either daisy just realized that she is no longer in daddy's arms, or she is wondering why she is making 'touchdowns' when its nearly baseball season. Go White Sox!

Hilary giving Daisy some breakfast. If Wine in Provence ever closes its doors, we have an opening for a full time nanny in Blacksburg. Hil was amazing with Daisy. Whenever Hilary walked into the room Daisy smiled at her. They became best friends on this trip. Not the only female Daisy would become friends with on this trip. More on that later.

So...there it is. The leaning tower of Pisa. That is the real deal. In our course of driving in figure eights around Pisa the night before we thought we caught brief glimpses of it a few times. The first one, was a water tower, that I spotted....hey it was very dark out and we were all delirious from driving in circles.

So it isn't nearly as tall as you would imagine, and its not leaning nearly as much as you think... or so I thought. It was quite amazing, none the less. It was very ornate and like many things in europe, just amazing that was a thousand years old and still remained...even more so to me, that it never completely fell over. (They have done some remedial work to the soils to stabilize it)
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There is some sort of ram-goyle on the side of the cathedral. We thought it would be a funny picture to try and make it look like the ram had hit the tower causing it to lean. Not nearly as funny as the picture of me 'pushing' the tower over, to an awaiting Dominic with his hands spread apart waiting to receive it. The picture was taken with the other camera, so you'll just have to imagine it. Scenes like this were the most common poses all around the tower. Most were of people trying to hold up the tower.

They replaced six of the columns with concrete. Hey, I studied structural engineering in school. It interests me. Gallileo also conducted tests on gravity from the top of the tower, which by the way was leaning when it was finally completed. Does that seem funny to anyone else that he was testing gravity from a tower that was being pulled down due to gravity?
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So enough about history and really old stuff, back to food. Some got these little pizza puffs I guess I would call them. He had had them before (not in Pisa, none of us had ever been before), and they were quite good which held us over until lunchtime.

Before we could focus on lunch for ourselves, we wanted to find something for Daisy. We heard that there was what we could call a farmer's market, but to the Italians its just their daily market, so we ventured over and found a banana that I mushed up for her and gave her when we sat down to eat lunch.
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Before we ate lunch, we stopped (Hilary and Wendy and Daisy, Dom and I went to scout out lunch locations) to buy some italian clothing. I expected some nice leather products, maybe some boots or something... about 45 minutes later they came away with a hat...for Daisy. It perfectly matches mommy's hat and its a hat she can wear this summer as she doesn't have many summer/light hats. A perfect purchase! Besides, Daisy would look funny in leather boots right now.

A picture of mommy and daughter outside the store, which I think was called, "Z"

Ahhhh yes. lunch was finally upon us. Dom and I located a nice italian restaurant in this outdoor mall/shopping area of town that we were in just a short walk down from where we bought the hat for Daisy. This place looked affordable and even more important, it had some pictures to go along with the descriptions, which was helpful, even though I ended up selecting lasagna, which I didn't need the picture for.

It was good. Not as good as teh food the previous night, but this we decided was more of what you would expect from somewhat of a fastfood type place. It wasn't fast food like you would think of McDonald's or Burger King (or Fazoli's), but it was simple and pretty quick and you paid when your food was brought out.