I wonder if they decided to build a church on top of the sidewalk, or build the sidewalk through the church.. This place supposedly stores yet another relic that supposedly touched Jesus at some point. How many body parts of Jesus do various Catholic churches claim to possess again, and how many Jesuses could you build from them?
So where do you live? Oh, I live on Via Delle Belle Donne...
Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa. A university founded by Napoleon. Nice place to have lunch in.
This is pretty much what all streets in Pisa downtown look like. It's a real maze, and because the streets are so narrow, the GPS signal jumps around like an amphetamine-crazed Batman donning a jetpack.
The place I had my meetings in was 50 meters down this cave--sorry, this street. No wonder that so many cars in the city look like their owners' method of choice for stopping is to ram the vehicle into something.
The church and the tower. My meetings held me up for the daylight hours, so once I got this far, the sun had already set.
Every tourist seemed to be doing something like this, so of course I had to give it a try, too. What great fun. It's actually sleeting, the temperature around 0 degrees...So...
I always say that Italian people don't know how to make good pizza, based on my experiences in Rome some years ago. Had some really nice pizza this time around, washing it down with a 1-liter jug of weissbier, so I stand corrected: combining the 2-star and the 4-star pizza experiences brings Italy's total to 3 stars out of 5. They still need to work on it a bit, though, if they wish to reach the 4 stars that I give to Pizzeria Baabel in Kaijonharju, Oulu, Finland (circa 2004, that is: they've really gone downhill in the past couple of years).
I usually get along quite well with smart people and Italians are not an exception. It's just that sometimes(read: all the time) their aggressiveness is so damn tiring, brains or no brains. So of course the Italian idiots annoy me even more than the Finnish idiots. In Finland they normally just kinda sulk in small groups, knee-deep in their own spit, but in Italy filtering the same people out is a lot harder. I'm usually not considered to be a very typical Finn, far from it, but I really do appreciate silence, whenever I can find some.
Also, Ryanair just lost its position on the top of my airlines-to-be-avoided-at-all-cost.
All hail Finnair, the new champion!
Fuck that company and their staff's inability to deal with a queue less than 10 meters tall in 2 hours. They have a single(1) transfer desk in Helsinki airport, which is supposed to be their main venue, and the greasy-haired guy behind the plexiglass would fail to serve every single customer lining up in front of me, even when they just wanted to have their boarding passes printed.
Listening to the Finnair-dude's studdering English was almost, but not quite as annoying as listening to the air-headed Chinese lady right behind me in the queue having a never-ending conversation with her group of 20 more Chinese tourists. She would actually answer her own questions without giving the others a go at them, and as far as I could tell, she never once stopped to inhale. The information content in her Mandarin babble was pretty close to zero, so after an hour of involuntary eavesdropping, I was ready to 1) drown her in the nearest lavatory, 2) drown myself in vodka.
So happy to be back home (No vodka, though; 2 fingers of Laphroaig will have to do).
Pisa is a pretty place: a true relic straight from the middle-ages and renaissance, and well worth a stop of couple of days. I'm very glad that I don't live in a house 500 years old, though, those things are cold!
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