Pisa

Eagerly, we headed to the train station in Naples to board our train for Pisa, looking forward to a change of scenery!! We still had not quite figured out which platform our train was leaving from when this helpful man came up and asked if we were going to Rome. I explained no, we were going to Pisa, to which he nicely explained that the train to Pisa usually leaves from Platform 3 and then he reminded us that we needed to validate our tickets (you stick them into a little machine in the platform which stamps them) before we boarded the train. What a nice guy, I thought - an actually friendly and helpful bystander! We thanked him and waited for the train. When it arrived, he came along again and pointed out which car we were in (even though we could have figured that one out) and then before we could say anything, he picked up Jim's bag and took it to our compartment. Too late, I caught on to what this was all about! He then took mine even though I was only a couple of people behind Jim and proceeded to put mine in our compartment to, all the while chatting away in his friendly, broken english. After he was finished - you guessed it - he put his hand out for a tip. Arghhhh!!!!! Catching us off guard, we thought well, we'll give him a euro or two, but instead only had under one euro in change between. Continuing in his very friendly way, he said 5 euro or so would be fine to which we happily replied that the change he was getting was ALL he was getting. Well, he looked at the coins in his hand like we had just spit into it and just turned around and left without another word. Quite the scam he had going for sure........goodbye Naples!!!

After a comfortable 6 hour train ride north to Pisa we arrived in lovely, quaint and clean Pisa. What a breath of fresh air - literally! In fact, it felt a little like home to us with the cool, moist air that we're used to in Seattle. Talk about clean! Our hotel was perfectly situated in the heart of the old town, but get a load of the hotel room......I think my dorm room in college was bigger than this. We were just going to deal with it but when the t.v. wouldn't work, they very nicely moved us to a different room down the hall with one nice big bed which was much more comfortable.

The Leaning Tower was really something to see. Funny how things sometimes don't end up lookng like you think they'll look - for some reason, I thought the tower would be taller and dark and discolored like so many old structures in Europe. It turned out to be a bit shorter than I expected and the while limestone (or marble, not sure which) was as sparkling clean as you can imagine. It was really amazing how quiet the town was and how few people were out and about. Granted, there are only about 80,000 people there, but still.........we sure didn't complain, though. After the chaos that was Naples, this was definitely food for the soul!!