Serendipita

Ahem. It seems that my site was down today because I didn’t renew the registration. My e-mail app considered the reminders from my registrar as spam and apparently transferred them to my junk folder automatically. Only after I realized just now that the domain expired yesterday did I find the last reminder still in the junk folder.

I just renewed the domain and have to praise my registrar, gandi.net, because serendipita.org showed up again less than five minutes after I paid the fee by credit card. Great service!

And I set up my e-mail app to not consider their messages as junk from now on.

I’m back! The school trip went fine, without major problems. We didn’t lose any students, nobody got ill or injured, and we didn’t miss any trains. Even though I always was a little nervous in the back of my head (as you have to be as a teacher responsible for 23 students, even when they’re legally grown-ups) I had fun and enjoyed the trip myself. We landed in Cologne around five yesterday, but it was 8:30 pm when I finally made it home. One thing you don’t get to do much on such a trip as a teacher is sleep, so I had to catch up today before I return to school tomorrow.

Here are a few photos of some famous landmarks we visited on our trip:

I’m sure you know this one: It’s the leaning tower of Pisa (Wikipedia entry in English, auf Deutsch), la Torre Pendente, which we visited on Monday. It is not only leaning but also bent because it started to lean while still being built. It is moving with a rate of one millimetre per year even after having been stabilized a couple of years ago.

On Wednesday, we went to Firenze (Florence, Florenz) and saw the Cathedral (below), the Palazzo Vecchio, the Ponte Vecchio, and visited the Museum of the History of Science. (My favourite exhibit, by the way, was the replica of Lorenzo della Volpaia’s planetary clock.)

On Thursday, we went to Lucca (English, deutsch), a beautiful city that has conserved a lot of its old charm within the original city walls. Here’s the former amphitheatre, which has been converted into houses.

And last but not least, here’s a photo of the Mediterranean Sea, taken at the beach near our hotel in Viareggio (English (deutsch).

More pictures to come when/if I find the time…

It’s the day before the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Tomorrow morning at 6:40 am, I’m boarding a plane that will take me to Pisa, Italy. I wonder if it’s more or less safe to fly on 9/11 than on another date…

By the way, this is not a trip for fun: In Germany it’s customary for students in their last year of the Gymnasium to take a study trip to another European country, and I’m going to chaperone them, together with another colleague who planned the trip. We’re flying to and from Pisa, but are going to stay in a smaller town on the coast, Viareggio, and are going to do some day trips from there by train. We are going to visit Florence (Firenze) and Lucca, and possibly other towns.

Thirteen years ago, I went on a study trip to Tuscany (Toscana) myself, and I’m looking very much forward to seeing some of the sights and cities again that I visited then. I’m sure that this trip is going to be somewhat stressful - after all, we have to look after a good two dozen students -, but I hope that it’s also going to be fun and exciting.

I’ll be back on Saturday afternoon.