Siena and Arezzo

Yesterday we took a day trip to Siena. It was a very beautiful city. We took the early train and got into Siena around mid-morning. The train that we took was a very fancy train, it was a high-tech train with computer capabilities and the seats we placed in semi-circle formation. We arrived in Siena really not knowing that much about the city except that it was not Ossaia, and that was all that mattered! haha! We managed to navigate the bus system to get us to the heart of the city. Everything else from there is walking distance. We went to the Palazzo Publica, it had wall-paintings of good vs. bad government and one of my friends on the trip is an Art History major and had studied this very building, so we were given a private tour through the palazzo by him! The piazza in front of the palazzo is famous and is broken into 9 sections on the ground with each section leading to an exit and to another area of the city. After a nice patio lunch in the piazza, we all split up for a while. Some still needed to finish their gift-shopping for people at home, and I really wanted to walk around for a while. So I took every street and corner turn that I could find, but always keeping the clock tower of the palazzo in my eye-sight so as not to get lost. I ended up going for a 3 hour walk around the city and took almost 100 pictures! We all met up at the appointed hour, got pizza to go (yummy!) and then headed back towards the bus stop. We had a perfectly timed trip back, we were just in time for the bus, caught an earlier train, and then the connection in Chiusi arrived just as our train did. We made it back into Terontola to catch the last bus of the day. We've all decided that it is probably not the best idea to keep walking the dangerous highways at night, so we are making real efforts to plan our travel around the sparse bus schedule in Ossaia. Oh well, it's all a part of the experience. It was so nice to go to Siena yesterday and have a much needed break from digging in Ossaia. Today I got to sleep-in again, and right now I'm in Arezzo. It was a short train ride from Terontola, and a nice change from always going to Cortona for internet and the occasional meal. Alright, this is my last week in Ossaia, and I will be heading back to Edmonton by next Sunday. I will be spending one night in Rome on my way back and my friend Marie and I are planning to have a quick tour of the Pantheon before our flights back to Canada. The temperature is a boiling 30°C again... Ah, Italy is... WONDERFUL!