Friends in Firenze!

After Rome, we had an early train to Florence the next morning. We only had one day, so we immediately got some lunch and headed out to see the sights. It was unfortunately raining, so we didn't get to do as much as we had hoped, but we got two main attractions down. First off, we went to see the David statue by Michaelangelo. This statue is modeled after David and Goliath, and is extremely famous, and to be honest, I don't know why. We paid ten euro, to see a thirty foot statue of a naked dude with a sash. I mean yes, the craftsmanship is fantastic and extremely detailed. But I could have spared the ten euro, and seen the decoy and recreated one in a piazza not far away, and not even known the difference. Regardless I tried to make the ten euro ticket worth my while, so I strolled around the museum seeing a lot of Roman 'busts' and a moderately entertaining photography exhibit at the end of the museum.

After the museum, we opened our umbrellas and made our way over to the Duomo, a famous church. I swear, I have seen more churches than people since being here, yet I still find the need to go inside each one and take a picture of the altars and mosaic work. I think it some how makes me justify the fact that there are so many, so at least if I have pictures, I can differentiate between them when I am asked. I don't know? Anyways, we saw it, and it's gawky, tacky, and kind of ugly. On the outside, it's white with green, red, and other various colored boxes painted on the outside, extremely hard to miss. But on the inside, it's calm, and the only architectural echo is in the floor tiles, which match the colored panels of the exterior. We were told to climb to the top of the bell tower, to get a complete view of Florence. It is 463 steps exactly. I thought it was no big deal. I thought wrong. It literally took us about half an hour to climb the never ending staircase to the balcony of death. Just when we thought the stairs were done, it was just a small platform to another staircase until finally we had reached the precipice of an insane amount of stairs I never want to climb again. We climbed up a steep ladder and out on to a platform balcony caged in by railings, and the view of the entire city was upon me. I could see the Tuscan hills, and basically every house in the city. It was gorgeous. Even on a cloudy, misting day like it was, I could see the beauty of the rustic red rooftops and the contrast to the green Tuscan hills in the distance. I was at peace with the amount of stairs I just hiked to get this view and realized the eight euro was totally worth it.




Florence was gorgeous, and had weather permitted we could have seen a lot more. We had to travel by foot, and I was cranky due to the weather and our early train ride, so we all decided it was enough for the day. We went back to our hotel and talked with some Italian men, who spoke broken english. It was fun to try and decipher the language barrier between us and them, and we even learned some new italian phrases. They were curious about American life, and asked if it really is like what's on television. I found it extremely fun listening to them talk to each other in Italian, with full knowledge of the fact that I had no idea what any of them were saying. I loved listening to the language and realize how beautiful it was compared to English. New goal, learn to speak Italian. CIAO.