Contiki Chronicles, Day 10: ITALY!

At long last, I finally decided to get off my ass and start writing these things again. Although by this point it's been almost 9 months since all the stuff happened, so my recollection may be a little... rusty.

Anyway.

Day 10 started with us leaving Antibes and heading south. After some amount of driving, we exited France, and crossed over into Italy. Our destination? Just a little city in the more northerly part of Italy, by the name of Florence.

But first, a stopover to gaze in amazement and awe at one specific tower.

A little note about Pisa: The place is famous for its Leaning Tower. But something that isn't as well known about the place is that there is LITERALLY NOTHING ELSE TO DO THERE. Seriously. You go in, check out the tower, take the obligatory photos with you in weird poses and then get the hell out because that place is hot as fuck.

Speaking of photos:

I don't know what you're talking about. Clearly that tower isn't leaning at all. It's just everything else is.

Okay seriously though, there's the tower. Now you don't need to go all the way over to Pisa to see it. When they built it, the city was basically doing it to show off their wealth. But what I gather happened is that they just so happened to build it on the worst possible place, and with improper foundations. Meaning that when they were three quarters of the way through building it, it started to lean. They kept building it though, and you can see that the upper floors are sort of angled in regards to the floors below them.

There's also this big ass lawn out the front that you're not allowed to step on, meaning that the road becomes clogged with tourists, and every twenty minutes a Police Officer and/or Security Guard has to come and yell at people for being on the lawn and doing stupid shit like this:

Yeah, that's a human pyramid in front of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, because why the fuck not? I think making stupid poses in front of the tower is sort of like the unofficial pastime of the entire City, and all tourists are required by law to pick it up whilst in the city. Which is why I discovered a hobby of taking photos of people in stupid stances from a totally different angle, without the tower in the background. Kind of like this:

Because it cracks me up the amount of stupid shit people will do if they can get a photo of it.

Oh, and here's another photo of the tower, because why not.

It's seriously not leaning at all. I don't get this country.

After lunch, we cleared that hell hole of a city, and got back on the bus and after much more driving, arrived at our destination.

Now, Florence is a pretty cool city. But we'll get to that tomorrow, because that's when all the stuff we actually did in Florence happened. That night, we went to a karaoke bar, I drank a 2 litre jug of Long Island Ice Tea almost entirely by myself, and ended up not being as drunk as I'd expect, but still pretty drunk. That was a good night.

I'll try to update some time between now and three months from now with day 11. 

Duck Junk: A haiku

I saw a duck's junk.
What the everliving fuck?
That shit is messed up.

Stimulate me!

Totally not changing that post title.

Anyway, I'm making a post. On my blog.

Madness.

I often find myself struggling for things to put on this blog. I kind of know why, as well - I use writing as a means of organising my thoughts - putting them down somewhere so that they're on the page instead of running around inside my head. On top of that, the act of writing, of creating meaning through words, is what helps me to understand a lot of things. My brain is a messy and confused place, so it's not really the ideal workspace to try and sort through the various conundrums that constitute my life. The problem is that whenever I have something I want to say, I generally have other avenues to pursue in order to thrust those words out of my mind.

The other thing is that I think I may have left the purpose of this blog a bit too intentionally vague. Well, vague and/or non-existent. I don't really have any good reason for making a blog; anything that I want to say desperately enough, I have other places to put them. You'll notice I usually begin my posts with either "This has been on my mind for a while..." or "I guess I should probably write something, but I have no idea what." Or words to those effects. The thing is that I fail at spontaneously coming up with things. I need some sort of stimulus for me to get the ball rolling, and then only after that does the whole writing process happen. My thought processes are reactive, not proactive. And I'm not too sure if that's a problem or not.

So, I've decided that I need some sort of stimulus for my posts. I suppose I could pick a random word every day and write a post based off of it, like a certain other blog I know, but that just doesn't seem right to me. Instead, I'm turning to you guys - all 20 of my followers (although I'm fairly sure most of that 20 probably haven't checked the blog in months, if not longer). What I want you to do, is comment on this post with a sentence, or a word, or some other kind of stimulus, and if I feel up to it, I'll choose one and write something using that stimulus. It may be some kind of short story, or a bunch of random musings, or a haiku... basically whatever I feel like doing at the time. Please, though, don't ask for anything like "You should write about..." or "What are your thoughts on...". Nothing like that. The stimulus has to be able to stand by itself as an entirely separate entity to the fact that I'm going to write about it. That's the only condition I have, so get commenting!

An update or some shit, I guess

This is the post where I let everybody who cares know about what's happening.

The short answer is not much, really.

The not-as-short answer is that the short answer is more or less bullshit and that last week I started university. I also have a new laptop, and with any luck I WON'T spill coke all over this one. I've moved into college, met a bunch of cool people, and also done a fairly solid amount of drinking. Which, to be honest, is probably something I should tone back on. But... meh.

Oh, and since I now have an actual computer and decent (-ish) internet, I can once again start writing up the Contiki Chronicles! I might actually get it done before a year after I started...

So that's about everything I can think of at the moment. I'm kind of tired, so I might just go to bed.