Lucca, and Montecatini Italy

Five weeks of traveling is the average European and Australian’s vacation. This is my third week in Italy and my eyes are bugging out from caffeine-fueled window shopping and sightseeing.

So far it’s been 1200 Cappuccino’s, 400 Vino Rosso’s, 300 bottles of aqua minerale’, 200 appertivos, and 8 million slices of Italian bread with olives and cheese, but who’s counting! The amount of saints here can fill a stadium, and the pizza and pastries still look appetizing but I don’t want to eat them. I’d rather just stare. So now I’m staring at a deeper level, beyond the surface. I’m looking at vending machines, where you can much more than snacks and cold drinks. You’d be surprised what you find on display here.

Our past three days in Lucca have been a staring, oggling, coffee swilling window shopping fest on a quest for shoes made in italy. You can’t really appreciate shoes made in Italy unless you have some Italian in your DNA, and those Italian genes went straight to your feet. Shoes made anywhere else in the world just don’t feel perfect like Italian shoes do. Italians understand food, wine, art and FEET. We gaze at shoes, and stop frequently at a favorite cafe called PULTE. It has everything you could ever want; Wifi, Exotic snacks like Vegetable pudding pie, all kinds of coffees and cocktails, pidgins who parade on a red carpet, and clearly marked restrooms. if you ever crave shoes, shop in Lucca. I didnt take picture of the huge wall that surrounds the city, but you can probably imagine what it was like back in the day…in the 12th century. They probably sold a lot of sandals here.

Next we explored Montecatini, a pretty little posh resort town in the hills where people go mainly to soak in therapeutic thermal pools of water and get spa treatments. We soaked for an hour, and I to get into this strange hot tub contraption, where yu peddle while you soak in scalding bubbling seltzer water, , but an angry-looking gym attendant dude chased me out of there and just said, “NO! Extra!!” How do you say “I hate my job!” in Italian? Maybe he looked at my cankles and hairy legs

After our shoe shopping mission was complete we took the local train to Montecatini to explore this sparkly little spa town in the hills of Pistoia.