Firenze

I am sitting in the Firenze train station waiting for train to Milan and figured that now was as good a time as any to update the blog and it is somewhat of a ramble.

As I have travelled north in Italy, it has become more and more expensive and there are a lot more Americans everywhere – perhaps there is a correlation? When I arrived on Friday, I set out to shop and sight see cuz that’s what I’m here for. By late afternoon it was time for a gelato cone and while I told the clerk, "piccolo" (small), she kept adding gelato and then put a small waffle on top. The kicker was that she was done, said "that is 6 euro please" (about $9.50). I said, "no, no," I wanted "piccolo, piccolo." The bag lady in me was revolting. Very disgruntedly, they took the waffle off and gave me a much smaller cone – price 3 euro, twice the price as I have paid anywhere! Needless to say I did not have gelato every day here.

The other difference that I have found is that there are a lot of mosquitoes and bugs here and there are no screens on windows. In Lucca, I got bit by a few and have the red itchy bumps to prove it and the same here in Florence. I got back to my room last night and had it out with one of them. I refused to go to sleep until I knew it no longer existed!

Florence is a city with lots of neighborhoods tucked away, lots of open air markets selling everything you could imagine but predominantly leather and then there are the beautiful designer high end shops. In my search for a new red leather zip wallet, I found out about all the different types of leather, the fewer pieces - the better made and more expensive, why Italians don’t use zip (too many gypsies to see everything) and that prices can range for a similar wallet from 25 euro at a street vendor to 125 euro in one of the nicer shops. I did not find my dream wallet but did settle on a very nice red wallet which will suit my purposes nicely and a red wallet has good feng shui.

While I haven’t met my dream companion yet, I was propositioned twice last night in a matter of a couple of hours. First was by a young Italian man who wanted me to buy him a drink to spend time with me – NOT. If they can’t afford a drink, they can’t afford me. The second one whose name was Abdul who wanted to help me pack and "just spend an hour with you". These were both tempting offers but decided to pass – comments welcome :)

Surprisingly, I had an opportunity to climb up and down the 483 to the top of the dome of the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore (Duomo of Firenze), it's dome is larger than the U.S. Capitol and the Pantheon in Rome. The lines were winding around the block, it was raining and I decided I needed something to come back and see. I did tour the Uffizi Museum which houses the great collection of Renaissance paintings and sculpture. It surprised me that the early paintings between the 13th and 15th century were mostly religious in nature and it wasn’t until the 16th and 17th century that artists decided there were other subjects, and far more interesting too. The frescoes on the ceiling were amazing with no two alike.

I’ve been thinking that I am not going to travel through Spain as I have in Italy, moving every few days – it is somewhat exhausting with the trains, hotels, packing and unpacking. Instead, I have picked a few cities I would like to see and will try and spend 5-7 days in each. They are Barcelona, Valencia, Seville, Madrid (?) and Bilbao and then move on to Portugal.