Shortest Stay Ever in Pisa?

I certainly hope this is the shortest amount of time anyone's ever stayed in Pisa because there's literally nothing to do. After Como, I went to Venice for 1 night, 2 days. I wanted to stay longer, but the cost of hostels was outrageous, even for the 1 night. I discovered there was no easy way on Tuesday night to get from Venice to Cinque Terre, unless I wanted to spend 6 hours in a Florence train station. So out of necessity, I decided to spend last night in Pisa, which is only 1 hour away from Cinque Terre (aka "the place I'm most excited about in Europe").

I just completed the sightseeing part of Pisa, and it took all of 11 minutes. Instead of having someone take any pictures of me in front of the Leaning Tower, I decided to take pictures of other people getting their pictures taken in front of it. What is it about this Tower that brings out the jackass in everybody? Check these pics out:

(Good thing all these people are keeping the Tower from falling down)

Anyway, even though I haven't had any other major issues with the trains over the last 2 days, they have still been consistently late by 5 or 10 minutes. I decided the Italian train schedule is about as accurate as Julie is when she's estimating how many blocks we have to walk to get somewhere in SF. We could be 30 feet away or 5 miles away from something, and when you ask Julie how long til we're there, she always answers, "6 blocks." Same thing with these trains. It could be coming at 4pm or 4:45pm, but it's gonna say, "4:30."

Speaking of Julie, she had asked me a couple weeks ago what are the weirdest or strangest things I've seen in Europe. At the time, I didn't have a good answer, but now I think I can run down a list. In no particular order, the things that are most different here than in the U.S. are:

1). Dogs are allowed to go everywhere with their owners. You can find lots of them on trains, buses, or in restaurants.

2). The amount of food stands & vendors in all the major cities is incomprehensible. They are open all the time, and near all the major areas in a city, there seems to be hundreds of them.

3). I believe every European smokes cigarettes--no exceptions. As a matter of fact, in Prague I saw 2 moms with their 9 or 10-year-old kids (2 boys, 1 girl) all smoking together at a bus stop.

4). Breakfast is the strangest meal here...because it sort of doesn't exist. Unless you count a loaf of bread & some jelly as breakfast. It seems like people skip the stuff I'm used to like eggs, pancakes, toast, or anything like that. Instead I've seen a lot of people eating hamburgers, pitas with pork in them, pasta, etc at 9:30 in the morning here.

5). Despite the above references to smoking & the amount everyone seems to eat, Europeans seem much healthier as a species than Americans.

6). The amount of bikes on this continent is crazy. People ride bikes everywhere.

7). Couples walking around with their hands in each other's back pockets, basically playing a constant game of grab-ass. (Actually this happens in the U.S. too, but I've been meaning to say something about it for a while.) This is such a weird thing to me & I hope no one I know does this.

And with that, it's almost time to head to the train station, so I will leave you with a few more pictures of my last 3 days.