Accident-prone Germans and seafood overload

Man, what a day! This is going to be hard to keep under 50,000 words but I'll try to make it manageable -here goes...
Woke up today at breakfast with some great news...Sandra and Tony, the two main chefs, wanted me to help them prepare dinner for tonight. Mind you, this was no ordinary dinner. This was a dinner I imagine to be along the lines of something the ancient Roman emperors would eat if they were training for sumo wrestling...or for the birthday of the brother of an Italian chef (Sandra) and their entire family. Wow...more on that later.
Anyway, today's lessons taught me so many new and interesting things. I have my bechamel sauce down pat, learned how to preserve fresh herbs PERFECTLY in the freezer for the winter (something I learned today that I imagine might save me in food costs the cost of this entire trip), learned how to make PERFECT gnocchi (something I've had some difficulty with in the past), and I also learned to make "pasta foro" (probably bastardized the "foro" part) which is the single greatest pastry dough in the history of the world. Also, I learned how to cook Roman gnocchi which are really basically polenta coquettes topped with Gorgonzola and Parmesan and baked in the oven...foodgasm. Anyway, so we made all that, I didn't stab myself today, and the best part...we got to eat it all afterwards and no words of mine could ever do this food justice. Hopefully I can recreate it to somewhere near what I've been eating here at Toscana Saporita. It would be cruel and unusual punishment to myself and others to not recreate these recipes again and again.
Anyway, after lunch, Sandra and Tony put me to work. I got the job (the one they didn't want to do) of scrubbing and de-bearding enough blue mussels for twenty hungry Italians when the request of the birthday-boy was specifically blue mussels...translation...alot.
So after the arduous task of cleaning the mussels, I then helped stuff them with a mixture of bechamel sauce, breadcrumbs, tuna, and shrimp and then submerged them into some spicy marinara to bake in their closed shells in the oven...All I know is that if reincarnation is real, I'm switching from wanting to be a dog, to wanting to have the pleasure of being one these lucky mussels covered in a bechamel stuffing and drowning in the world's finest marinara...wow.
 It was at this time that I had to leave the prep work (for now) to go with the one and only Elena and the others to visit Pisa. Honestly, I wasn't too excited to see Pisa. When I was younger with my parents in Italy, I remember getting off the tour bus, getting hounded by gypsies, going Godzilla-style fighting off the waves of annoying Japanese tourists taking those lame pictures (you know the one, where you are "holding up" the leaning tower of Pisa in the background) and then getting back on the bus feeling unimpressed and slightly violated. WOW WAS I WRONG...
First, however, we went to a little town basically between here and Pisa called Torre Di Lago. It was pretty (you can see the pics as well as all the others at http://picasaweb.google.com/harrison.d.sonntag), but it wasn't to interesting other than Jiacomo Puccini, the Italian composer, lived there. Now, he is super-famous here, but, honestly, I'd never heard of the guy in my life so it didn't really mean anything to me ,and I had to say it here because I felt like I had to pretend I knew who the hell this guy is all day and its been annoying haha.
Anyway, then we went to Pisa. Good news: the tower is still there, leaning, same as last time. Better news: NO gypsies, very few annoying street vendors, and the city itself, the place where no actual tourists go bc it doesn't have a leaning tower of some sort, is AWESOME. Man it was beautiful, and really just a great city. I was soooo delightfully surprised. However, even better was another priceless gem I learned from Elena, our tour guide, who I've gotten to know well, seeing as how I'm traveling alone and the other groups of two with us have each other to talk to.
Anyway, it went something like this:
Elena: "Harrison, what nationality is Sonntag?"
Me: "Well, actually, it's "Sunday" in German."
Elena: "Ahhh, deutsche, huh?"
Me: "Yes ma..."
Elena: "That's too bad, the Deutsche are accident prone."
Me: "What? Haha, well I guess I could see..."
Elena: "No! You 'no understand.'Every week in Italy, some Deutsche tourist drowns in a lake, gets swallowed by a wave at the beach... they always are dying."
Me: "Um, well, I guess they are just adventurous or something."
Elena: "No, it is DNA, also. They just do stupid stuff. Like they walk on top of a city wall, they fall off, it's just natural for them. They can't help themselves. Harrison, don't do this."
This is when I just laughed really hard and she gave me a funny look lol.
Anyway, it's starting to rain and the only place to get internet is outside here (great setup lol), so I'm going to have to postpone the telling of the grandest feast ever. If you check out the pics, I promise you, you will not have to eat the rest of the day. Ciao!