NOW i know you've probably been waiting with baited breath for the next instalment of our lovely blog, but iona and i like to keep you on your toes, because it makes us feel important to have people checking to see if we've written anything new. and also we haven't had any computer access for the past week and a bit... sorry.
anyway. after our lovely whirlwind tour of rome we headed to florence on a very cheap, not entirely pleasant local train so that we could impose a bit of WT09 magic on yet another city.
we got briefly lost after getting off the train (a bit unfortunate because we'd told a nice guy we met on the train that we knew the way to the hostel) but we got there 'in the end' i.e after about 15 minutes - florence is almost comically tiny.
after discovering our roomates (2 nice australian girls, an extremely annoying argentinian guy and a rotating 6th person) we decided to spend as much time as humanly possible avoiding conversation with the argentinian, who spent most of his time either interrupting you when you were doing something, staring vacantly and inappropriately or singing in spanish then translating for our benefit. by the end, each time he opened his mouth to say anything iona would quickly say something (anything) loud and irrelevant to keep him quiet... and even that only sometimes worked.
thankfully, florence being such a beautiful little city (full of the cobbled laneway type streets where pedestrians reign over cars and there are markets everywhere you want to go) it was definitely a pleasure to be outside and out of the hostel. it was lucky that the city was so small because we were constantly getting lost or distracted by markets or just wandering in completely the wrong direction, as one does. my map skills may be much improved but they are a very very long way from perfect...
we spent a lot of time at the amazing galleries (specifically the uffizi and the academia) where we got to see some incredible art like the statue of David (Academia) and The Birth of Venus (Uffizi) as well as heaps of other equally amazing but less well known art. actually most of it was well-known, just not to us. Unfortunately you weren't allowed to take pictures inside (understandably) as one poor girl discovered the hard way when she took out her camera and a guard came leaping over people etc towards her shouting 'NO PHOTO NO PHOTO'. it was quite entertaining, but i think only because we weren't the ones to have whipped out our cameras!
we also saw some incredible churches, like the duomo, which is the 4th biggest cathedral in the world and is incredible. we went to a mass there, and even though neither of us is catholic or can speak italian i think it was one of the best things we did while we were in Florence. Especially because it took us a couple of goes to actually find the entrance for the mass rather than the tourist entrance just to see the cathedral! if this makes us sound a bit stupid, believe us, it was very confusing - the duomo had multiple doors, each used for a different and unique purpose!
another day we went to Pisa, home of the most famous of the world's dodgy building attempts - the leaning tower of Pisa. the tower itself is very very comical in real life, much more so than i'd ever imagined. it looks like someone put it there as some sort of joke. of course, we took the obligatory (and hilarious) 'holding up' and 'pushing over' the tower photos, defying the guard who tried fruitlessly to keep about 400 people off the grass. ha. good luck.
so basically our time in florence was spent discovering that just because a city is tiny doesn't mean that it isn't home to some of the most amazing things in the world. and also (of course) keeping up our daily gelato. i'm sure you would expect nothing less.
much love,
vivienne (and iona)
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