Tuesday saw us hopping back on the bus to hit two Tuscan towns, San Gimignano (I know, "where?", right?) and Siena ("Hey, who doesn't want to see Siena?")
By the end of the day my opinions had reversed.
San Gimignano is a small but charming town with a lot to explore, especially if you like climbing hills. The pace of life is rather slow. I got separated from my group when I ducked into a chemist to buy some sunscreen, something that I expected would take only a minute or two. Instead the very pleasant pharmacist insisted on describing every last detail of the products on offer to me. I was getting about 8 words out of every 10 (she spoke no English), but those two words mounted up, and up and up and eventually I was about 20 sentences behind and desperately trying to keep up. I swear, had we spent any more time together we probably would have been deemed to be married and our kids would be on their way to university before I finished getting the receipt. For all that, I rate it as a positive experience.
By the time I came out the other three had given me up for lost. (We still had no SIMs and therefore no mobile phones at this point.) I later found out that two of them later lost a third member of our party, and those remaining two figured that the only way to deal with it was to hit the Gelato bar to console themselves.
Siena in contrast did not strike me as a very friendly town. It's a town which relies on tourists but which makes little effort to accommodate them by including, say, public washrooms. (And my won't you get a snitty response if you ask where one is at the tourist "information" centre, even if you do it in Italian.) Also (although this is subjective), I did not find the architecture as appealing as that in San Gimignano. I met a few friendly people in Siena and bought some lifesaving universal power adaptors for us at a small electrical / hardware store there (after they returned from the lunch break at 3pm, which was charmingly quaint (and no I'm not being sarcastic about that) since the ones we had were non-functional. But while I missed the opportunity to climb the tower there, I've no great inclination to go back.
San Gimignano, on the other hand, I'd love to stay a couple of nights at. Some of the photos that I've seen of it at night look beautiful.
As for this one... I was originally doing a conventional shot of one of the arches that served as town gates when I noticed this bird (pigeon?) taking off. I therefore opened a bit of space above and shot. Had I known it was coming I would have liked to have been either open an extra stop or up one stop of ISO or both to freeze the action a little better, but it was one of those "this is the moment, no second chances" things.
I was still pretty pleased with the result.
