Oh The Places We’ll Go

We made it to Florence this morning after spending our last night hanging out with the British girls in Rome.  I must’ve woken up at like, 5 o’clock this morning before laying back down for another hour or so to relax before getting up and moving around, packing up our stuff and planning out the rest of our day.  We checked out of our hostel this morning around 9, put on our packs and made our last trip on the Metro in Rome to the Termini, where we waited around, had a McMuffin, and boarded our Eurostar train to Florence, which they call ‘Firenze’ here in Italy.  We sat next to these two old Italian people headed to Milan on the train, who understood NO english but we could tell they were friendly, nice people.

The ride to Florence is absolutely beautiful.  THIS is where the beauty in Italy comes from: the small towns, the fields, the little old houses in the middle of vineyards and rolling hills throughout the country.  No graffiti, no nonsense- just pure beauty.  The train ride lasted a little over an hour and a half into Florence, so after the train stopped Thomas and I got off and tried figuring out how to make it to our new hostel.  This hostel was a lot more difficult to find than our last one, especially since Florence doesn’t have a metro system since it’s much smaller than Rome.  We got on a bus like our hostel directions said, but even after we asked the bus driver if the stop we needed was on his line, he never told us WHAT stop we had to get off on.  So, after getting lost, Thomas and I walked with our packs on in the heat for well over 20 minutes before we found our hostel.

This hostel, the Soggiorno Pitti, is MUCH nicer than the one in Rome.  They have TV, which I said a ‘Halleilujah’ for, and we have our own room and bathroom in the hostel.  Turns out we have to share a bed, which is… whatever, it is what it is, we came from the same place so it’s not a big deal.  We got a chance to catch a little bit of the Olympics finally, since we haven’t seen any of it yet, so we watched a couple of swimming heats before getting our room.  We have a TV in our room, but it only has like, 10 channels and all of them (of course) are in Italian.  After settling in, we watched a little bit of MTV Italia, and their version of TRL was on.  It was pretty funny since all of the music videos for the Italian artists are SO BAD, but they still have at least a couple of American and British music videos on their countdown.  Randomly, the top 2 songs on their playlist were ‘Killing Me Softly’ by The Fugees and ‘When A Man Loves A Woman’ by Michael Bolton.  Random?  We thought so.

So our plan for tomorrow is to explore Florence since we’ve only got 1 day here to really look around, so I think we’re going to go and see the Galleria dell’Accademia where Michaelangelo’s David is, and the Uffizi Art Gallery where a lot of famous pieces of art are.  It’s going to be a busy busy day with a lot of walking but Florence is a small town so I doubt it’ll be too strenuous, especially since we don’t have to wear our packs everywhere.

I haven’t been able to put our pictures up on the internet yet, but when I have the chance I’ll try and show everyone what our travels have been like.

Ciao