The slow train trip to Pisa was just what we needed after the frenetic touring and travelling and inspection of ruins and old buildings. We even had the opportunity to read a book.
After some 4 hours or more, we arrived at our destination. Melanie eventually found a lady who gave her a map of Pisa and she marked the route to the tower on it - or her idea of the scenic route.
Pisa was no different to any other town in Italy – full of old beautiful buildings and extraordinarily erratic drivers. Unlike Roma, it was reasonably clean and did not have that lingering smell of urine that you so often encounter there.
We slowly made our way through the city, all the while waiting to catch a glimpse of the tower over the rest of the city buildings. We were to be disappointed.
Eventually we made our way into an area that contained three buildings, one of which was the leaning tower of Pisa. It wasn’t leaning when we first saw it and it certainly isn’t a tower. The lack of leaning was explained by the fact that when we first saw it, it was leaning towards us. However, it does have a very good lean on it.
Interestingly, I have heard many people complain about how small the Mona Lisa is (and it isn’t, but it is dwarfed the huge paintings at the Louvre which does make it seem small) but I have never heard anybody mention that this is not a tall building – the church next to it appears taller.
Nevertheless, it is an attractive building and it does look like it should fall over.
We took the usual, rather pathetic tourist photos of the girls all holding the tower up but quickly became bored as this was the only attraction.
Chelsea and Melanie decided to climb the stairs to the top of the tower. Their parents rather wisely decided that this was not an option for them and left them to undertake this rather onerous task. However there was a glitch in this plan. The cost to do this was 15 Euros (about $25) and they could not do this until around 5.30 as there was a limit of people (I think 40)allowed on the tower at once, presumably to stop the tower from falling over if they all stood on the same side at the same time. Given that we were more than 4 hours from Roma, it would seem that we would not return until well after 10pm at the earliest.
Back to the railway station we returned to catch the train back to Roma, where to my disgust, I had to buy more expensive tickets as the slow train was departing much, much later.
Melanie received a message from Andrew. In his indecent haste to ingratiate himself with Melanie’s parents, he had offered to have dinner ready and on the table on our return. Given the estimated hour of our return, we accepted.
It turned out that Andrew could possibly make a better living being a chef rather than a teacher, and the cold bottles of beer that were ready for drinking helped to soften my attitude towards him. I still can’t work out why any intelligent man would want to become associated with my dysfunctional family, but as they say, the world moves in mysterious ways (well that’s my saying and no debate shall be entered into)
Tomorrow we fly to Athens for our cruise around the Greek isles, no doubt this will be very hard work but we will persevere.
