Florence

On to Florence...

We took a 6 pm train from Venice to Florence and got in around 8 or 9. We were wandering around trying to find our hostel walking past amazing Florentine architecture when we hear this voice saying “Lars, Lars is that you Lars?” We turn around and suddenly there is this guy waiving at us. He is like “Lars, party of 3?” and we kind of nod, he goes “I'm Franco I run the hostel, its right down the road, number 1, I'll be there in a bit”. We immediately knew that we had chosen the right hostel. Franco is the man. Our choice was only justified more as time went on. He did a number of really cool crazy things. The night later we were getting ready to go out and offered him a drink, he refused it because he was already 4 beers deep for the night. The man!

Anyhow Florence was really cool, we got some good touristing in, seeing the top 5 things that our travel book recommended. They were all fairly nice. I really like Florentine Architecture it has a very open walkable feeling while still being awe inspiring. I think its a combination of the 4 story buildings that are just gigantic and the wide walking paths. The Doumo was fantastic. We didn't go inside, but we did climb to the top. It was 8 euro well spent. The view was even better than the view from the top of Michelangelo's Vista. Lars got some nice panoramas. We then went to see David, which all in all was a 10 euro rip off. All that was in the place was David, and while he is impressive I don't know if I want to pay 10 euro to see him. Anyhow that was our first day. We wandered back to the hostel after having Gelato about 10 times better than anything we had in Venice and met another guy from Seattle. He just happened to be a busniess major and going to the UW as well. Small world.

An aside before talking about the night. I really can't stand the tourist culture over here. You wander into the historical center of the city and you can speak English just like your back in the States. You look around and half of the population is old British people on vacation and the other half is a smattering of people from around the world. No locals at all from what I could see. Hell, when I was up at the Doumo I herd so much Japanese that I could have sworn I was back in Tokyo. There was Japanese all over the place. Still cool city.

Ok Chris was crazy, but awesome. He was doing the same thing we were doing except by him self and without a guide book. Basically his tour turned into a 3 week party in different countries. That didn't exactly change with us. We killed a bottle of wine togeather, wandered out to get more, and wandered to get more and got sidetracked by a street performer and then by a Church that was playing really great Organ music. We finally wandered back to the hostel and went out to a Wine bar where I ran into two Japanese O.L's I proceeded to talk with them for a while. I was a lot of fun to break out my Japanese again. We wandered off to another place after that, but I got bored and went back to the hostel after a few minutes.

Florence day one was over.

The next day we woke up and realized how much it sucks to stay in a hostel that doesn't serve breakfast. We wandered off to get kabob's and then went to the Uffizi gallery. We should have reserved tickets. We waited in line for 2 hours. I napped for a bit in line and then had a nice talk with two older girls from Alaska. They were fun to talk to, one of them even worked in a Biology lab. We also met a Aussie who literally studied rocket science and a Italian girl who was also in Biology. We had a nice long chat while waiting in that god forsaken line. The worst part of it all was that the Uffizi gallery was boring. There wasn't really anything interesting in there for us to see. Wasted day, check.

We went back to our hostel after that to grab our stuff and had more amazing gelato. After that we decided to head for Cinque Terre. I should mention at this point that we haven't booked any hostels in Cinque Terre. Lars wanted to have an adventure. I thought he was an idiot. My motto is prepare as much as possible and don't try to find adventures, if you do things right they will find you. Intentionally booking a hostel is not the right way to get things done. Sadly I was in no condition to plan these things out the night before.

We hopped on the train anyway. We made our transfer in Pizza to La Spezia. We were about to wander out an see the tower when we ran into two Aussie girls that we had met twice before on the trip. Once on the train from Madrid to Barcelona and once in the train station in Mont Pellier. Totally random. We never did see the tower either. Apparently its not worth it. I'm glad we passed it up.

We finally got into La Spezia, which is a town about 10 min away from Cinque Terre around 9:30. We were told this was the better place to find a hostel so we started wandering. Jeff and Lars were being stupid and talking about sleeping under bridges. Thankfully after about 10 minutes of wandering we came across a hotel. The guy at the front desk asked if we needed a room and told us it was 20 euro a night. Thats where I'm writing this entry from. My sketch meeter is going off even more so than it was at A Venice Fish, but there are locks on the door 3 beds and it smells fine. It remains to be seen how things go.

Anyhow thats the trip so far. Hiking in Cinque Terre tomorrow. I'm excited. Although it might rain which would really suck. Anyhow more on that tomorrow. Chao.