Anyway so I do believe that I last left us off in the boiling city of Rome. I cannot even begin to explain to you how mice it was to finally get out of that oppressive heat and into the wonderfully air-conditioned bus again. Anyway we started out the morning heading for our next destination, Florence. Now I'll be honest, I didn't know much about Florence before coming on this trip. But as it turns out they are famous for their leather and gold. Awesome, both of which are completely out of my price range. Anyways, more on that later.
When we hit Florence our first stop was a leather shop (But they sold gold and silver as well so what the hell...). I will admit that it was rather interesting to see how they made these rather fancy leather boxes. They are made of nothing but leather, no wood, no metal hinge, nothing. They also take a while to make and so cost an arm and a leg. Actually to be more accurate they pretty much cost one entire side of your body.
Anyways, after examining everything in the shop we had like an hour of free time so we went to go check out this church/cathedral thing. I can't tell what the difference is between them except the size and that cathedrals tend to have more fancy stuff in them... Anyway, this one was unfortunately under a lot of restoration and so a large number of the tombs were not on display which is unfortaunate. I did manage to see the tombs of Galileo and Michelangelo (Kawabunga dude [If you don't get the reference then shame on you]).
After wandering around the cathedral for a while we took a brief look around the town (As I said we didn't have much free time) before we went to meet up with the group again for a guided tour of florence. Now the fun and games was going to begin, and by fun and games I mean the most boring guide on the trip. She started by explaining what some of the statues around florence were (There are a lot of them). About the only two I thought were cool was the replica of The David and this other weird one where the artist sculpted his face onto the back of the statues head... Other than that the tour suuuucked. She spoke in a fairly monotone voice, it felt like a lecture. This wasn't helped by the fact that she gave far more information on the history of various things than was necessary including the origin of some words... which she would inevitably spell for us... seriously?
Anyway, we drudged our way through the tour before we had some more free time which was pretty much just spent walking around looking at the various shops while I forced myself not to blow all my cash on a new leather wallet. The one other place we saw which I thought was pretty cool was this other cathedral thingy. The only reason I found it cool was the fact that I used to have a 3D puzzle of it. Bug thing with an orange roof... I thought it was cool so screw all of you chuckling to yourselves. After the short free time we met up with the group again and headed to the camp site where we got to chill for a bit before heading back to the city to get a group photo and grab dinner.
The photo was pretty cool, taken with a great view of Florence in the background, but that had nothing on the dinner we had. The dinner was just made of awesome. We split from the main group for dinner and it was worth it. The pasta I had that night was made of win. I think the pasta was called tagliarini or something like that. It was basically a very thin spaghetti which I had with a nice rich carbonara sauce. Damn was it good.
Anyway, after the food we went on a little bit of a walk about while we waited for the main body of the tour to finish their dinner and grabbed some gelati (ice-cream) which was pretty cool. The best though, was the size of the cone the one girl got. Damn,it looked like a baseball bat with ice-cream sticking out the top of it, was kind of rediculous. After we met up with the group we headed to a karaoke bar to see if we were going to stay or if we were going to head back to the camp site.
To say the club was overcrowded would have been an understatement. The entire place was packed like the front of the crowd at a Rolling Stones concert, slightly crazy. Anyway, we gapped it backto the camp site with a bunch of the other tour people who didn't feel like getting squished. And that was about it for Florence and for Italy.
Cioa...
Score:
Me: 2
Her: 4
New Guy: 3
Chachi: 1
Bus: 2
Other Guy: 1
Vatican: 2
