Another early morning (are we supposed to be on vacation? This seems like hard work!) and off to the train station. The ship's shuttle bus took us into the center of the city and from there we needed to find the train station. A mom and her daughter from Canada were behind us in the information line and were talking about how they knew how to get to the train station, so we followed them and took bus #1 to the station. At the station we bought our train tickets for 2 Euros and waited for maybe half an hour for the next train. During that time we got to talking with the Canadians and somehow forgot to validate the train ticket we just bought :-( Just as the train was pulling away I remembered we should have done it, but then we thought well there was nobody checking on the Rome or Pompeii trains and in Israel you can do whatever you want... so we hoped we would be okay. UNFORTUNATELY, there was a security man who walked through and asked to see our tickets. Ken pulled out the tickets and handed them to him. The man looked very confused (he didn't speak much English) and asked where are you going? Rome? Apparently Ken grabbed our tickets from the day before and not the ones we just bought. He began searching his pockets and finaly found the most recent ones (which didn't have a validation on it). The man handed us a card that said in English the fine would be 40 Euros per person for not validating your ticket and got out his notebook to start writing a ticket. Uggh. We tried to tell him we just bought the tickets, but it was not changing his mind. In the end we ended up with a 10 Euro fine which was still cheaper than if we had taken the cruise excursion to Pisa for 99 Euros a person, but it was a dumb mistake. Especially since we were running out of Euros. Once of the train the Canadians wanted to take a taxi (hindsight we should have), but we decided to walk to the leaning tower which didn't seem too far away. Which is wasn't far away, but we did get pooped on by a pigeon which I think was the straw that broke the camels back. We made it to the tower took a few pictures and after a while headed back to the train. I was actually expecting something a little more spectacular like the Eiffle Tower and was surprised at how short the Leaning tower of Pisa was. We had thought about going from their to Florence before heading back to the ship but decided it was better to go back and get some rest. We remembered to validate our tickets this time... and took a walk from the station back to the city center where the cruise shuttle was supposed to meet us. On our way we walked by a pond that had maybe 30 turtles in it. We stopped an watched them for a quite awhile. I didn't pay that close attention when we rode the city bus in, so I was a bit nervous when we kept walking and walking and not finding the main square. We did eventually find it though and made it back safely to the ship. After dinner we walked around the ship and went into the hot tub for a bit. That night was the "Chocoholic Buffet" which we were interested in seeing (not that we haven't had enough sweets on this trip!). We got there right as they opened and I tried to take a bunch of pictures of the sculptures before they were descimated. You can only imagine the 3,000 passengers on the ship all pushing their way through to get all the chocolate they can. It was chaos. Kids were trying to carry three plates stacked as full as they could be. It was every man for himself in there. We grabbed a few chocolate covered strawberries and some chocolate cake and watched the mayhem. We are going to sleep well tonight.
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