Day 2 – Florence (2007.05.19)
Right now we have a little down time, riding the rails from Florence to Rome. The scenery is absolutely gorgeous, but looks like it’s on a loop – beautiful green pastures, villa on the hill, beautiful green pastures, rinse, repeat. So, it’s a good time to talk about yesterday – day 2 of our pre-cruise tour.
Breakfast was pretty good…it was a small buffet-style setup, with scrambled eggs, bacon and what I would imagine they’d call sausage, although it was really just cut-up hot dogs. We enjoyed some croissants as well, and I topped my meal off with some Rice Krispies. There was some sort of unidentifiable fruit in a bowl…it might’ve been pears, but I wasn’t brave enough to try it.
After breakfast, we met up with our group for a walking tour of Florence. I should mention at this point that we still didn’t have our luggage, but Constance (the tour director) promised that she’d be on the phone during the day trying to track it down. I had done my best to freshen up my clothes, and used Lindsay’s deodorant, but I still felt kinda yucky. Thankfully, Constance assured us that we should have our bags by the end of the day – while we were with our local tour guide, she’d be on the phone with the airport and whoever else she needed to – so we had something to look forward to. We left the hotel right after we were introduced to our local tour guide, and headed over to one of the many beautiful cathedrals in Florence. On our way, we passed through a market square where vendors were just beginning to set up their wares. Since I love shopping in flea-market-type settings (read: other peoples’ garbage), I told Lindsay that I wanted to come back during our free time.
What can I say about Florentine architecture that hasn’t been said before? It’s absolutely gorgeous, and breathtaking, even if you’re like me and not a follower of the whole Christianity thing. It was neat to see one church facade with a very prominent star of David – our tour guide explained that part of the church was designed by a Jewish architect. I’m not going to talk about each thing we saw, but you can check out the photos that we took this day. They represent pretty much our entire day, except that we couldn’t take pictures inside the Galleria dell’Accademia, which is where Michaelangelo’s David lives (although we did get shots of a copy outside of one of the churches)
. In addition to David, we saw a lot of other art, but my favorite part was an exhibit of 14th and 15th-century musical instruments, including a violin made by Stradivari. The Accademia was the last part of our guided tour, so we had some time to get lunch and spend on our own before the group dinner at 6.
For lunch, we sat down at a nice little open-air cafe (pretty much all restaurants in Florence have outdoor seating, since it’s mostly gorgeous weather) for some pasta. Lindsay had Quatro Formaggio (or however you say Four Cheeses in I-talian), and I had some sort of pasta with chili peppers and oil and other stuff…it was spicy and delicious. We finished lunch off with some fresh Gelato (pistachio for me, and stracciatella again for Lindsay), and then headed back to the hotel for rest and to prepare for dinner. However, once back at the hotel we found out that our luggage was not going to make it to Florence, and that it would meet us at Rome. We then began a very quick and frustrating search for clothes. Well, frustrating for me since Italians don’t seem to be fat…maybe it’s all the smoking they do? Anyway, Lindsay found a shirt and some underclothes, but I had a lot of difficulty finding anything in my size. I ended up picking up a pair of socks (sooooo comfy) and a pair of underwear (sooooo NOT comfy) at the dollar store, but went through about 30 different shops and booths before finding something that (mostly) fit at one of the market vendors. I did my first bit of haggling, and only got ripped off a little bit…it was a very proud moment. Then, we rushed back to the hotel (since we had about 4 minutes before the bus left for dinner), and made it just in time.
Dinner was at an interesting restaurant. The ambience didn’t seem like anything special, even though the restaurant had been converted from a prison a few years ago. We sat down at a table with the Hassans, with whom we had formed something of a bond – I may have forgotten to mention it before, but they (Abdul & Rozida) were on the same flight from Milan to Pisa, so they were also missing their luggage. Anyway, not to spend too much time discussing dinner, but I think I’m the only one on the entire tour who wasn’t really disappointed. Everyone was grumbling on the way back to the hotel and seemed to be upset with the tour director for picking such a so-so place. After getting back to the hotel, we just hung out for a bit, had our first (and as I’m writing this, last) access to the internet, and then went to sleep to get ready for the trip to Rome.
To be continued in the next thrilling entry, “To Rome!”
Images for this day can be seen here (starting with the 6th-ish picture, #20)
Entries (RSS)