Pisa

All my bags are packed I'm ready to go.... well I will be at 5.45 tomorrow morning. I'm flying from Robin Hood Airport (Donacaster/Sheffield) to Pisa in Italy for the princely sum of £42 - around $90. It's another three day trip. It's amazing what you can cram in to such a short time. I had been planning to see a Serie A football game between Fiorentina and Udinese but this will now be played behind locked doors following growing trouble with Italian football fans that culminated last weekend in the death of a senior police officer in Sicily. The Italian government have made a very strong stance on this issue - even threatening to halt all football matches till the end of the season.

Ah well, I'm sure I will find plenty else to do such as visiting the Leaning Tower of Pisa and the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. I wanted to book my Uffizi ticket over the internet but as I have discovered before, Italian websites sometimes appear a little backwards and don't make it easy to do online bookings. The alternative may be getting up early next Tuesday morning and queueing up with other tourists. The gallery is closed on Mondays for some dumb reason.

The plane back next Wednesday morning is at 6.30 am so I guess I will have to rise at 4am and arrange a taxi for the one mile journey from my hotel near the station in Pisa to the Galileo Gallilei Airport on the edge of town. I have an aversion to taxis and avoid jumping in them whenever there's an alternative. I hate the idea of tipping taxi drivers. I have been to hundreds of school parents' evenings and have never received one solitary monetary tip - often for months of hard work with difficult teenagers. Yet a taxi driver's body language says "tip?" every time. I mean - what do these guys do that's so bloody good? Sitting on their back sides, driving you short distances while the meter churns. A well-trained chimp could do that job.

So, dear readers, I'll be seeing you and if I don't visit an internet cafe in Pisa or Florence, I'll report on my short break when I return. Take care!