On Wednesday, we went to our new Italian friends house,Stefano's parents for dinner. When we arrived, we met Stefano's parents - Franco and Manuela, and his two sister - Francesca and Chiara and of course, we saw Stefano and Federica. We all fit around their table (with a bit of a squeeze) and sat down for 9 pizza's. That's right, you read it correctly, 9 pizza's that Franco had made!! We started off with some really lovely dough filled with cheese thing, and then started our massive main course! They did it well, because we had a piece of every pizza, and if you wanted more, you could have more. The pizza topping ranged from margherita to courgette! How cool! Apparently, he had been making the pizza's all day! How good of him! We had a really good evening talking and laughing about random stuff! We also asked the Milani family where they would rather go - Venice or Rome? Franco was the only one who said Venice, so we decided we would go to Rome. That was our evening in a nutshell. Chiara and Francesca showed be, Beth and Edie their Golden Retriever, called Buch - after the musician! Turns out that the Milani family have all been to the UK and really liked it! But it was weird, because Federica, Stefano, Chiara and Francesca all spoke really good English, but Franco and Manuela couldn't! So practically, all through the evening, various people were translating different things! It was random! it got to about 22:30pm, and when we mummy and daddy said 'well, we better go, the kids better get to bed', they asked us if we wanted to stay the night! How incredible, the majority of people in the house had only known us for a couple of hours and they were asking us if we wanted to stay in their house! That would never happen in England! Well, we accepted (because we knew that there would be a bed!) and stayed at their house for a night. We said 'good bye' to Federica before we went too bed, because she we wouldn't see her before she went too work the next morning. We had an excellent nights sleep, although I fell out of bed! Francesca gave her room up for us, and there were three beds, so the kids got the beds and the parents got the mattress from the rock 'n roll bed in the van! Hehe! Yeah, so the beds were really low, and I woke up in the middle of the night on the floor! So I looked around to check no one noticed, and gingerly crawled back into bed. I got badly bitten in the night, though, by annoying, little mosquito. I hate mozzies, I always get bitten a number of times, not one! It's so annoying.
Thursday was a pretty busy day, because we had breakfast as normal, and the Francesca told us that Franco had got in touch with the Deputy Mayor and they wanted an interview with us about what we are doing. We said goodbye to everyone (apart from Franco and Francesca, because they were showing us where to go) in the morning and went into the town centre. The place where we had the interview was INCREDIBLE! It was really posh, and the room we did it in had a massive chandelier and velvet chairs. Every place had a microphone, and we got to sit at the front talking to loads of journalists looking at us! We had a professional translator, who turned out to be half English, and that made it a lot easier! At the end of the interview, the Deputy Mayor gave us a couple of gifts, which was a DVD on Piacenza and a material shield thing with the flag printed on which could hang from something! It was all very nice! Then when we got out of the town hall, we were greeted by a TV journalist and camera who wanted an interview as well! The journalist was more worried about her fashion than her job! Seriously, she had a crop-top, a designer scarf, designer jeans and sunglasses! It was amazing! We then went and looked around the town with Franco and Francesca, and they took us into two cathedrals which were amazing! They were incredibly decorated and really massive. There were gold statues of Jesus Christ and Mary, and the alters at the end were massive. The weird thing was, the cathedrals looked really plain from the outside but really beautiful on the inside. They showed us the crypt as well, and there were over 100 pillars and every pillar had a different decoration. There were two pillars which just had a minor difference to the decoration, but were still different.
We went to have a drink after looking at the cathedrals, and Francesca asked if we wanted to go back to the house to have fresh Italian pasta for lunch! It was very tasty too. Eventually, we left their house at about 15:00pm, and drove away from our awesome friends! We drove towards Pisa and stopped at a campsite that we saw and stayed there over night. We all agreed that the Milani's were the kindest people we had ever met!
On Friday morning, we left the campsite quite late, at 12pm actually, so we drove to Pisa to see the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Edie was sick last night, so we went to bed quite late! I couldn't sleep either because it was raining ALL NIGHT! It wasn't like freak heavy showers, just steady rain all night through. It was so annoying. So I got too sleep at about 1:30am and woke up quite early because of the light out side. Not the best nights sleep!
When we arrived in Pisa, it was quite scary because when we were trying to park, there were black people showing us where the parking spaces were for money. It was really scary, because one kept coming up to us to sell things. Mummy eventually gave in and brought a bracelet off this guy! He was quite nice though! When we got to the Leaning Tower of Pisa, it was actually much smaller than I thought it would be, but I guess on pictures it looks bigger. It was also surrounded by palace's and churches, which I didn't expect to be there! Of course, we did all of the touristy things of taking pictures and looking like we're pushing it / hugging it / holding it up etc. It was a very funny 30 minutes! We then went and took a closer look at it, and it looked much straighter from most angles - well, at least not leaning over as much. We did take lots of pictures though, and I brought my first souvenir - a key ring which says 'Pisa' and the Leaning Tower is the 'I'. That went straight on my back pack! So we had a very eventful couple of days, but probably the most unexpected in the trip so far.
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