Pisa

I've quickly learned that there's nothing easy about EasyJet, except in the sense that it's easy to see why someone would have a nervous breakdown or go on a murderous rampage after flying with them.

My latest journey begins insipidly, at 2.15am, with a walk across Waterloo Bridge to a bus stop on The Strand. The bus to Victoria Station is late and filled with drunk South Africans talking about how many women they'd slept with that night and bewildered Eastern Europeans asking indecipherable questions of the bus driver, who is doing his best impersonation of a man who could not possibly give less of a shit if he tried.

I arrive at Victoria Station to find it closed, which would appear to be detrimental to my chances of catching the Gatwick train in fifteen minutes time. Many anxious minutes of confused glances at fellow travellers pass before, finally, a rail employee who must have a pint riding on who can look the least like he gives a shit between himself and the bus driver, pulls up the metal gate. The confused travellers and I pour into the empty station to discover that, guess what, the train is late. How on earth can a train arrive late at 3am? What has it been doing before now?

All these setbacks pale into insignificance once I'm inside the Gatwick terminal and in the hands of EasyJet. Their insistence to open only two check-in desks, irrespective of how many hundreds of thousands of people are queueing, means that I'm standing at the back of a long, static line of half-asleep people squinting at what may or may not be check-in counters in the far distance.

It takes me a while to work out why the line is moving so slowly, until eventually I get close enough to make out the check-in staff pointing out the "prohibited items" poster to each person as they check in, which is leading each person in turn to spend an eternity reflecting on which illegal things they may or may not have packed. It's the usual list of items that you'd most definitely need for a romantic weekend getaway in Paris or a few days on the beach in Mallorca: anthrax, hedge trimmers, propane canisters and the like.

Elderly couples at the desk asking each other, "Ohhh, errr, dear, did you pack that industrial belt sander in your luggage or mine? And what about the human stem cells packed into those petri dishes? Oh, we left them at home did we? Oh good". Elsewhere, low budget families, with their kids kicking and scratching around my heels, are ummming and ahhhing and asking throwing hapless questions at check-in staff. "Well you see, I was in such a rush that I can't remember if I packed that flamethrower or not. I really don't know, can I ask the audience?"

After 45 minutes of standing in line at check-in, another 30 minutes queueing for a Sausage and Egg McShit, and another half an hour blowing on my coffee until it has reached a safe temperature that will not cause my lips disintegrate on contact, I barely have time to turn to the old man next to me and say "what ever is the world coming to?" before the boarding call comes.

Everything goes well on the flight, up until a split second after the plane takes off and the baby two rows in front of me begins its usual routine. The screaming continues fiercely and unabated until touchdown in Pisa, but by this point I haven't slept in 24 hours and my tiredness pushes it to the outer reaches of my consciousness where it is more or less ignored and disregarded, like a Green party MP at a policy launch. And at the end of a gruelling six hour journey, I emerge punchdrunk into the dazzling Tuscan sunshine and breathe a haggard sigh of relief.

I step off the bus at Pisa and into a large piazza, at the far end of which is the Leaning Tower itself. Ellen quickly locates me amidst the throng of tourists, seemingly not a difficult task considering I'm the only man in Italy wearing jeans and a coat right now.
"What the hell dude? Aren't you boiling hot?", she says.
"Well I didn't expect it to be 25 bloody degrees at nine in the morning".
"It's always hot and sunny here! You're not in friggin' London anymore". Clearly. I can see large swathes of blue stuff above me which, from experience, look like clear sky. A dead giveaway that I'm no longer in England.

I must admit feeling a bit of a thrill walking past the Leaning Tower. It's another of those European icons I've seen in my mind a thousand times while growing up (and just about every time I've eaten a frozen pizza) and finally here it is, towering above me, and leaning. Pisa is not unlike a Southern Californian town in appearance, with its solid white villas and wide, tree-lined streets leading to distant scrub-covered hills. Replace a few of the palm trees with drive-thru fast food outlets and you could be in suburban San Diego.

Ellen takes me back to her and Michael's place and immediately goes to back sleep on the couch. Sleep, I'm soon to discover, is a favourite pastime in Italy. I suppose when you spend so much time engaged in impassioned debate and sex, the need for a siesta becomes more acute than it does in cooler climates. It's not long before I too find a suitable couch on which to drift off into a late-morning, and indeed mid-to-later-afternoon doze.

Michael comes home from the hospital and briefly joins us in the siesta-fest. He and Ellen are officially stationed in the hospital here as part of their med placement; however their tenuous grasp of Italian makes them rather surplus to requirements. It's hard enough to order a bus ticket here - as I discovered earlier - so I could only imagine that attempting to diagnose a patient whilst unable to speak a full sentence in their language would be a tricky business. It's a pretty big step up from their Samoan hospital placement, where the doctors and surgical teams generally resembled those four guys from the "V" ads.

"Yeah, Samoa was pretty cruisy", says Michael. "We'd be done by 10.30am on most days. If we were lucky we'd get to work in the intensive care ward. That was just like the other wards, except it had air conditioning".

Ellen and Michael have a pleasant surprise in store for me this evening. They're taking me to a bar, where all you have to do is buy a beer and youre entitled to free reign over their buffet food. I can't help but feel suspicious though. If there's one thing I've learned in Europe already, it's that if something looks too good to be true, it surely is.
"You'll see", says Ellen, on the way there. "When we discovered this place, the first thing we thought was 'wow, Max is gonna fuckin' cream himself' ".

That was a slight exaggeration on Ellen's behalf, but when I enter the bar to see massive buffet plates of pasta piled up on the counter, I begin to believe. I take up a table in the corner and Michael brings over some half-litre glasses of local beer. "Go for it", he says, gesturing the buffet with the trademark broad grin on his face.

This is not like your average buffet back home, with runny eggs, tough steak and undercooked bacon stewing in its own juices. This is fresh, simple pasta, served in four different dishes, with delicious pizza bites piling up on the counter. I fill my plastic plate until its dangerously heavy, then I take it back to the table and dominate it. Then I go back to the counter and repeat the process. By the time the buffet is taken away, we are all reclining lazily in our chairs, hands on stomachs, burping contentedly. The 8% lager Michael has bought me doesn't sit particularly well with the mass of carbs I just consumed, but it's making me pleasantly light-headed.

It doesn't even bear thinking about what would happen if a Dunedin bar - The Captain Cook, for instance - offered a similar deal. People would drop everything, everywhere, and make a beeline for the pub. University attendance would plummet. Crowds would gather on the grass strip across the road, swelling perhaps to the lawn outside the museum and spilling into the streets and public areas beyond. Students would arrive at the crack of dawn, buy one beer and spend the rest of the day alternating between eating the free food and shovelling the contents of their plates into tupperware containers to be microwaved and enjoyed in leaner months to come. Faced with an astronomical food bill, the Cook would go out of business virtually overnight.

And yet, here in Pisa, no one even seems to be batting an eyelid at the prospect of free food for the price of a beer. I don't understand it, but I don't particularly care either. It's just more free food for me.

We round off the evening at an al fresco bar on the river bank. A steaming hot day has mellowed into a sultry evening, and large numbers of locals are mingling with tourists in various outdoor drinking areas. It's my round, so I procure beers for Michael and myself and pay the lady. The price for two beers comes to 9 Euro, which is a little steep but I'm prepared to let it slide. Just as I'm turning to find a table, she says "Oh! Sorry, sorry, hold on" and disappears under the bar for a moment. When she reappears, she is holding two massive plates of cous cous, antipasto and other Mediterranean foodstuffs, which she places in our hands with a gratifying smile.

I'm on to something pretty good here, I reckon. A town where every beer comes with a plate of delicious food on the house. It's like a dream come true. We're completely stuffed from our meal at the last bar, but that doesn't stop us from cramming the latest offering in somewhere. It is free food, after all, and it would be ungrateful - rude even - not to wolf it down with gleeful exuberance. Which I suppose just goes to show that you can take the boy out of Dunedin, but you can't take Dunedin out of the boy.