Florence / Firenze

I think Florence might have been my favourite city of all the cities we visited. We arrived after our quick stint in Pisa and marched to the hotel we wanted. I say marched because it was hot and we were cranky (or maybe it was just me) and the walk was brisk and through the crowds and hot and my legs were sore from Cinque Terre and my shoulders were sore from my pack. Yuck.

We found the hotel but were told they were completely booked but the owner took us right over to another, fancier hotel, run by someone who was in some way related to him. This fancy hotel gave us a nice room for the same price as the other place.

We didn't stay long in the hotel because we wanted to see David. You know, the David. Thankfully, he was a short walk from our super hotel and there was no line up. It was weird, entering this gallery / museum, you saw signs everywhere saying absolutely no pictures and they scanned our cameras that we were blatantly holding on the way in, but everyone was taking pictures inside. Anyways, we entered a huge room, the walls covered in massive paintings, but no David. But then you walk down a hallway and bam! There he is. He's directly under a dome of skylights and surrounded by people. He's much much bigger than I imagined. We sat and talked and made fools of ourselves in front of one extremely knowledgable pretty girl but we were all sharing one room so R would have had a hard time convincing her to come home with him anyways. We checked out the whole gallery and the museum of musical instruments as well.

More than David, Florence for me was the canal at night. We spent a long time wandering around downtown Florence and taking pictures of the buildings and the canal that night.



It's extremely pretty at night. We were all trying to get the best shot and I don't know who eventually did but you really must check out all the pictures once I have them available on Flickr.





I was happy that we went back the next day and saw everything in the daylight as well. I feel like I really know what the city looks like now. This is a picture of the only bridge that the Germans didn't destroy in WWII. There is a lot of history surrounding this bridge that I won't get in to, but if you're interested definitely do some reading on Florence.



We were generally just relaxing and having fun in Florence.



That morning in the posh hotel, I came late to breakfast. On the table were the cutest salt and pepper shaker I have ever seen. As we were leaving I took a picture of them when the owner came by and handed me a set. He said that they were his gift to me and that I should write a good review at TripAdvisor.com, which I will do. I fully recommend staying at ____ (once I find the name I will tell you) if you ever visit Florence.



And that was the quickest rambling on Florence you will probably ever hear.