1/11/2010
I woke early again, but once we were showered & dressed we went up for breakfast, which was served in a beautiful little kitchen and we had cereal, yoghurt, cake???, bread, juice, coffee, ham & cheese, a most fitting start for the day. Elena sat with us with her little 5 year old son and we chatted to her while eating, her younger son was quite sick, so I talked to her about the antibiotics she was using & gave her some advice on whether it was the right one & how long to wait till they took effect. It was fantastic to be able to help her.
For our first full day in we were unsure of what to do, as we knew it was a public holiday & also most Palaces/Churches/Museums are shut on Mondays anyway, so we just decided to head into the centre and see what we would find. So back on the Number 11 bus and off we went. Elena told us that we needed to but tickets for the bus at a bar up the road from our rooms, but it was shut, so when we got on the bus we asked to pay & got the reply “finish”, so rode the bus for free.
Now let me describe the bus rides here, the streets are very narrow, about the width of 1 ½ buses, but along one side of the street is parked cars & motorbikes, so that reduces the size of the street again, then there is the footpath about ½ metre wide, which is full of people. None of this however slows the bus down; they travel at anything up to about 80km hour along these streets.
We got off and dragged out the map & between that & following our noses we wandered around the gorgeous streets, with shops & shops & more shops. One in particular caught our attention as it had beautiful leather boots & bags for 20% off, probably because it was a public holiday, and to cut a long story short I bought myself a pair of boots & a handbag.
We made our way further in to the centre & ended up at the Duomo at the Cathedral of Santa Maria, after going through huge squares with glorious churches & huge, huge buildings. Once in the middle of the square we found many artists setting up to draw/paint/sculpt etc, so got a caricature of ourselves done to go in the bar. I think we ended up getting the guy a heap of business because lots of people stopped to watch us being drawn and were impressed so lined up to have theirs done too.
In this short period of time (about ½ hr) the place filled up with thousands of people, so we just kept wandering around and then found a heap of stalls set up selling everything imaginable, as we were walking along I pointed out a leather jacket to Marty as it looked just like him, and once again to cut a long story short, Marty now has a gorgeous deer skin jacket. Forgot to mention that it was raining the whole time, so we were concerned about getting everything wet, carrying our backpacks & umbrellas and trying to keep our purchases under the umbrellas as well, was getting difficult so we found a little bar & sat down for an Italian wine. I would never have thought that Italian wine was any good, but we had the local stuff and it was just as good as Aussie wine. After a while the owner then brought out pizza for us, for free, well there was lunch.
It was about 2 by this stage and still raining and there were even more people, so finding it all a bit too much with our unexpected purchases, we decided to head back to the room. We eventually found our stop & had yet another free, hair raising trip back.
The afternoon was pretty uneventful & we had dinner at the same restaurant that night. This time I chose the special, it was titled Spaghetti, but I had no idea what was in it when I ordered it cause it was in Italian, but I am always up for a surprise. It turned out to be Marinara, and really scrummy, with mussels, scampi & pipis. Along with the litre of wine & Marty’s pizza we had another delightful cheap dinner.
2/11/2010
Another beautiful breakfast with Elena, and some plans of what we wanted to do today, we headed off on another free bus ride into town. We found the Uffizi and queued for about an hour to see the oldest & most famous museum in Europe, (I thought they said that about the Louvre too). We saw some of the most famous drawings in the world, but unfortunately we were not overly impressed. We just can’t get interested in art.
We decided that as we had queued for so long to see the Uffizi that we weren’t that keen on doing it again to see David so opted to find the copy, which we did fairly easily. He sits in the place of the original sculpture but has a lot of company with many other statues in the square.
I then wanted to go to the Market Centrale, so with map in hand walked in the approximate direction, and where should we find ourselves but at the same little bar as yesterday. Fate had brought us here so we stopped in again for a wine. And once again we were given pizza but this one was twice as big and had anchovies & capers. We are not normally anchovy lovers, but these were beautiful. We also tried Chianti, which was also very good.
We found the market, which is a huge undercover produce market that had some of the best produce I have ever seen and none of it we could buy to bring home, except for a collection of olive oils including one with truffles.
Then back to the train station to buy our tickets for Rome the next day. We queued for quite a while & then got one of the rudest bitches we have encountered so far, she spent the whole time ignoring us while selling us tickets. I wanted to travel about 11 am but she said or more like grunted at us that there were no earlier trains than 4 pm. I then went to the toilet & was thinking that it was odd that we couldn’t get an earlier train as they run very frequently, so I checked the ticket & the dumb bitch had booked us on the train for that day. So I stormed back to the ticket office, ignored the queues and the fact that she had a closed sign up and very gruffly told her that she had booked the wrong day, she was rude back but changed the ticket to the next day for 11 am. I felt like I had had a win.
It was getting late so we decided to head back, found what we thought was the right number 11 bus but only to find after about 15 mins that we were headed in the wrong direction. We had a lovely tour of another part of Florence and then got off and changed to the right bus and another free ride home.
Back to the same restaurant that night, we figured if we were onto something brilliant why change. This time I ordered the 2nd special, and once again had no idea what it was, and was pleasantly surprised again. Ricotta with spinach balls, covered in a mushroom & vegetable sauce. God I can pick em.
3/11/2010
We were sad to say goodbye to Florence and to Elena, she was a very special host and helped us so much. She ordered our taxi for us & then gave us a bottle of wine as a thank you. We will definitely come back to Florence one day & hope Elena is still running the B&B.
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