Pieces of Pisa
Young people by the River Arno Of all the destinations that my friend Viktor and I travelled to on our "Marvellous Misadventure"*, Pisa was the one that surprised me the most. Designed mostly as a brief stopover that conveniently doubled as a tourist destination neither of us had seen, I expected it to be no more than that - a cramped city where we'd have to endure throngs of crowds to snap a few pictures, rest our heads a few hours and nothing more. Perhaps it was the surreal day preceding our arrival that made it particularly treasurable. They say** that to travel is to suspend one sense of reality and trade it for another. And October 24 was nothing short of surreal: in the space of 12 hours we travelled 200km, with 10 of those kilometres spent traversing the rocky cliffs facing onto the Italian Riviera (and another 5 running back and forth between the train station and some kindly hotel staff who agreed to mind our bags while we hiked). We saw the candy-coloured build
