Here's my albeit-small Flickr set of Pisa:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/81692166@N05/sets/72157645352566707/
It was about a half-hour train trip, and the trains were (apparently) every half-hour, even on weekends. After walking the 20 minutes to the station, we discovered that apparently they skip three services on weekends. Luckily we only had to wait at the station for a little under half an hour. When the train did get announced, everyone quickly had to change from Platform 4 to 1, despite the fact that ours was the only train at the station.
The train itself was in the old drive style. You could tell when the train changed from first to second to third gear going out of each station, and dad was convinced that we weren't going to make it to Pisa, such were the grinding noises that were emanating from the engines.
Eventually we did make it to Pisa, getting off at San Rossore rather than Centrale, the former of which is much closer to the Leaning Tower, and the other buildings in the area. Our plan was to walk there from the station, then on to a square and to the banks of the river that runs through Pisa, before getting on a train from Centrale back to Lucca.
The Piazza dei Miracoli, which is the plaza that houses the Leaning Tower also has a baptistery and the Duomo di Pisa. There's a massive expanse of green lawn with plainly-visible "KEEP OFF" signs. Not that it stopped people. I've never seen the attraction to photos with people pretending to 'hold' the tower from toppling over. Indeed, I did snap a couple of photos of one moron on each fence post with one or both hands outstreched:
From the Piazza dei Miracoli
After seeing the tower, we walked further to the Piazza dei Cavalieri (Knights' Plaza) and to some stunning architecture. There's a church and a palace on the outside of the plaza, which is almost an amphitheatre, with a couple of roads going in and out:
From the Piazza dei Cavalieri
From there, we walked down to the river, which was supposed to look quite nice. By this stage the weather had started to get dark and stormy, which made for some decent photography, but unfortunately I didn't quick when a couple of local girls asked me to take their photo, yanked the camera from me after I'd done so, and sprinted for cover. The heavens opened about 30 seconds later.
What fascinated me especially was that the African men illegally selling trinkets managed to turn into umbrella sellers within about 2 minutes. The men were doing a booming trade, as they were being hailed from cafes like a taxi. By the time the storm had passed I counted several trinket sellers that had completely sold out of umbrellas:
The waterfront and old town of Pisa
Still partially soaking having ducked for cover a little late, we walked to Pisa Centrale and sprinted to the train and made it to Lucca nearly half an hour later. We found our route back to the station blocked by a fallen tree, which had totaled a Range Rover and NEARLY totaled an expensive-looking BMW.
The most hilarious part of the fallen tree was the emergency services man trying to operate a chainsaw to cut the tree into pieces. Now, I don't pretend for one minute to know how to operate a chainsaw properly, but I'm fairly sure I could even outstrip this guy.
The rain had totally cleared by the time we walked home, but the thunder hadn't. We hurried back to the apartment to prepare dinner and our trip plan for tomorrow, when we will head to La Spezia, which will be a base to explore Cinque Terre and some of the other countryside. Bye for now!
