Counting Years Passed

It's a small midnight party involving fruits and cakes. Thank you everyone for coming!

Pick Your Apple

An apple a day keeps the doctor away, that's a slogan people used to keep you eat your share of fruits. And anyway, apples are common and inexpensive.

These apples, however, are different. I took a snap of them at the Swarovski Kristallwelten (Crystal Worlds) in Innsbruck, Austria. They sell high class stuff, many with 3- 4 digits price and there I was wondering which things I could get as souvenir.

Perhaps now I should start taking oranges instead.

Lucca: Behind The City Walls

Italy has been divided into small villages for a long time. During medieval times wars between villages are not uncommon. For this purpose some of them have walls built around.

Lucca is an example of such village ( or city now as the population increases). They were once at war with Pisa. Compared to Pisa, the walls around Lucca is more well preserved.

Within the city stood some watchtowers. Too bad we did not make it before the closing time to climb one of those. The city itself look similar to the other Italian cities. But having these walls around sure has added to the sense of being in medieval times.

Pisa: The Leaning Tower

Pisa is probably more famous and become tourist destination because of the leaning tower.

The tower is supposed to be a bell tower for the city cathedral. We were able to get on top of the tower through a spiral staircase within, for a limited time of half an hour only and saw the nice scenery from there.

Would it be better that the tower was straight instead of leaning? I thought of that, and see if I could push the tower back to normal. But then on second thought, the world already had so many straight towers. Let this one be lean then. So I stopped pushing.

But apart from the tower, the city of Pisa is really a small peaceful city in the middle of Italy.
Clear sky. Green grass. Vast view. Those things relaxes the mind.