Florence

So after our wonderful time in Rome we had to catch our train at 6:45 in the morning.  So we got up and said goodbye to our wonderful hotel, after helping the desk clerk from NY do some music downloading.  We caught our train to Florence and were able to sit together for this train and arrived safely in Florence at about 8:30.  We walked to our hostel, only about 5 min away from the train station again to a little places called Hotel Armonia.  It was fun by this one Italian guy named Marco and was a very small hostel, just one floor.  So that's our room, with my friend in the picture, oops.  We were able to drop our stuff off in the Hotel and go explore Florence without our stuff.  The nice guy brought our bags into our room for us and when we returned later that afternoon our stuff was waiting for us, nice and safely.

So after we dropped off our stuff we just wandered towards the river.  We stumbled upon the river pretty easily, all roads lead to the river in Florence. Then we decided to stop by the embassy to talk to them about our strange encounter at the Bologna Train Station (you all know how it ends though, we're fine).  This excursion introduced us to the strange numbering system they have in Florence.  We thought we were looking for one number and as we walked we came upon what we thought would be the embassy based on the number of the building, but it clearly wasn't.  Turns out the numbers aren't always in order, and they have the same number for multiple buildings on one street, how their mail gets anywhere is beyond me.  But we finally arrived at the embassy, with the soldiers, military truck tucked around the corner, and the American flag, needless to say it was funny to see and also kind of comforting.  The American Embassy is seriously one of the most secure embassy's I've seen, as you would expect, lol.  Well we chatted with them, got our email address to email them at and went on our way.  But not before documenting our time at the embassy!

Vista of Florence

We looked across the river and saw a really cute small waterfall and area to walk down to.  So we went across the river to check it out and relaxed for a bit.  We had 4 days in Florence so we were able to relax and take our time getting places.  After that we decided to head towards the Piazza de Michelangelo.  We stopped at a sandwich shop to pick up a light snack and walked up the giant hill to the Piazza, which I incidentally kept calling Plazas the whole time, oh Spanish...  The Piazza de Michelangelo is on top of a really big hill so it was quite the workout to get up it.  The ramps are steep, but it's totally worth the climb.

Me on the top of Piazza Michelangelo

At first I was confused because it's mostly a giant parking lot with a fake David in the center, all green and fake.  It was especially entertaining to watch the Asian tour groups take pictures with it, or take pictures really far away with all the kiosks in the background too.  But I was slightly unimpressed with the fake David and went straight to the balcony to see the view.  You can see a beautiful vista of Florence from the top of the Piazza and it was really cool to see things that we were going to see later that week.  We were able to see the Dumo, the Uffizi Gallery and even the Synagoge.  Yup, that blue dome is the Synagoge, which has a really interesting story.  We all talked about what that could possibly be for a while because it looks like a church.  We visited it later in the week and found out it's shaped like that because when it was built they wanted to blend in.  Cool huh?

We hung around the Piazza for a while and got hungry so we wanted to head down and find food.  We walked back down and found a good pizza shop near the river.  So we grabbed some really good pizza and sat on the ledge and looked at Ponte Vecchio for a good hour.  Ponte Vecchio (old bridge) is the oldest bridge in Florence.  When the Germans occupied Italy way back when Hitler destroyed all the other bridges to the center of Florence except for this one.  Stories say he thought this one was too beautiful, but who knows the real story.  Now it's one of the most famous bridges in Italy and it's really cool to walk down.  They rebuilt the rest of the bridges, but it's a pity they didn't rebuild them better because they just all look like ugly cement bridges now.  But Ponte Vecchio is now lined with tons and tons of shops of really expensive jewelry.  We walked down it and window shopped and dreamed about what it would be like if we could afford to buy something from the shops on Ponte Vecchio.  But our pizza was delicious, and we had some fun keeping the pigeons away from us.

After that we just headed back to our hostel to relax for the rest of the day until dinner time.  Rome was a whirlwind of activity so we were still pretty exhausted from the two days before.  But on our way there we bumped into the Dumo!! The Dumo is a really famous church in Florence, that is designed in pink, black and green marble...sounds gross doesn't it?  You would think so, but it's not!  It's stunning.  We were walking back and all of a sudden we were dumped into the Piazza Dumo and this giant structure was in front of us.  We resolved to visit it later because we were tired and the line was long.  But it was really cool to see it, and we also found out that it's like right down the street from our hostel, so we pretty much passed it every day on our way someplace.  So we headed back to the hostel/hotel and took a nice long nap and then looked in my handy dandy Let's Go Europe book for a good place to eat.  We ended up going to a place called Cafe Dumo for dinner and got an awesome 10 euro meal with pasta, salad and a glass of wine.  Then we had amazing gelato after dinner that we just couldn't pass up.  On our way back though we ran into a Spanish lady who was lost and couldn't find her hotel.  She was so happy that we spoke Spanish and it felt good to help someone.  After that it was off to bed because we had an appointment with the Uffizi Gallery bright and early the next day.

Lines we avoided

Tuesday Morning we woke up bright and early and took off to go to the Uffizi Gallery.  We were so happy that we bought our tickets online because once again we showed up and skipped probably a good hours worth of lines.  After going through two different lines and getting our tickets, going through security and such we were finally inside the Uffizi Gallery, which is huge!  We weren't allowed to take pictures in there, but that's fine because there was just so much to see.  I saw really famous pieces like The Birth of Venus, The Madonna of the Long Neck, The Anunciation (Da Vinci) and a bunch of other niece pieces.  Then there's tons of statues every where, and the really scary ones, I can't remember what they're called but they're statues of people frozen in horror.  So there was a lot to see, and by the time we got out of there we had spent almost 3 1/2 hours inside the Uffizi. We literally explored every single room so I was on art overload.  But I really appreciated the art I saw in there, it was really cool.  Outside the Uffizi they have even more statues and a big fountainesque area.

Giant statues outside the Uffizi

After we went to the Ufizzi it was looking pretty glum so we headed over to yet another Let's Go Europe recommended restaurants, called The Little David.  They had awesome pizza, and right as we got inside the place started filling up and it began to pour outside.  We were pretty happy that we made it to the Little David pretty quickly and felt a bit responsible for filling up their restaurant, seeing as we were the first ones in there :)  But the food was amazing, as I expected and we hung out there until the rain stopped and decided what to do next.

We looked up in my book and wanted to go someplace that had cover in case it decided to rain again so we decided to visit the Synagogue.  It wasn't very far from where we were so we headed in that direction.  But before we even got 200 feet away we were greeted with the Lindt store.  Naturally, we just wanted to go inside and look at all the amazing chocolate, then we decided that we would all share one bag of chocolates and we each got 5 of our favorite truffles.  It was so worth it, every time we turned around we were like "oh, I want that one!"  But we contained ourselves and bought 5 chocolates each and then went on our merry way, very pleased with our chocolate.  We even showed self control and monitored our consumption and ate a truffle about every hour so they didn't all disappear quickly.  When we got to the Synagogue we had to leave our bags and stuff in little lockers and no cameras were allowed, but it was fine because we were tired of having our bags with us anyways.  So we walked in and it was gorgeous!  We even realized that it had quite a bit Moorish influence, based on the architecture style inside the building and all the thousands of different designs.  Abby picked that up right away and we continued to notice more and more of it.  It was beautifully designed on the inside, and it was gigantic.  They even had a museum that told you about the history of the Synagogue which was cool too.  So we spent some time in there glad to be away from the gloom and seeing some really interesting history.  When we left the guards outside the Hebrew School said hi to us and commented on our bag of chocolate.  They so wanted some but were on duty, hahahah it was hilarious.  After that we went back to our hotel room with the intentions of taking a nap but ended up talking for about 3 hours giving each other book recommendations.  Then we wandered down to a restaurant towards the train station but got a bit lost.  We finally found it but it was very crowded so we went down the street to a less touristy restaurant with excellent pasta and wine.  We finally left after about 2 hours and walked back speaking spanish!  We confused so many people on the way back because we're American girls, and then they heard us speaking Spanish, it was entertaining and funny.

I'll do Wednesday and Thursday in the next post.  As you can see, my days in Florence were pretty docile.  I didn't do too much, we relaxed a lot and took our time getting around town.  We meandered and sat around in places, it was really nice.

Until next post! Love you all!