Another mediocre meal last night–we think maybe we’re not spending enough to get real fare (we’ve only had homemade pasta at lunch spots, and that seems like it should be a given at any meal over here), so we’re going to try a place one of Derek’s ND classmates recommended tonight. We’ll see…
Wow, I am tired. I keep thinking how just seven years ago, we were in Europe for a month, walking everywhere, following Dr Stewart up mountains and into castles. I feel a lot more than seven years older. We didn’t have too much planned today, so we went into a big market to get pastries and cherries for breakfast (followed by a supermarket for yogurt–how do Europeans make it without any protein until dinner time?). We did all of our souvenir/gift shopping in the San Lorenzo market. I won’t tell you what I got because all our recipients are reading this blog, but we each picked up a Florentine-made leather wallet for ourselves. Shopping and bargaining wears me out, so I was the crabbiest I’ve been yet as we waited for it to be noon so we could go to lunch! Poor Derek. We tried to have lunch at a RS recommended cafe, but they didn’t have their lunch menus out yet at 12:10. So we just ordered sandwiches (which were quite good) and sighed at our American tendency to eat early.
We wandered around quite a bit before going to the Accademia mid-afternoon. Michaelangelo’s David is the main attraction, dare I say the only attraction. David really is breathtaking. We just sat and stared in awe. There are some interesting half-finished Michaelangelo sculptures, but we were shocked to have done the entire RS audiotour and visited the other, deserted rooms (including a collection of musical instruments) in less than an hour. Uffizi this was not.
Refreshing ourselves with gelato (I’ve now tried kiwi, pear, strawberry, raspberry, lemon, almond, nutella, chocolate, vanilla, grapefruit, and chocolate chip), we got in line to climb the dome of the cathedral. Unfortunately, a group of dumb, spoiled American college students doing a summer abroad got in line behind us. I have an entire separate post on American college students studying abroad composed in my head that I’ll save for another day. But I digress. We climbed 463 steps. Beautiful view. I asked a couple of American girls to take a picture of us. We now have proof that we were in Italy together!
A few other notes…there are a lot of gypsies here, begging. I didn’t see any in Rome.
Europeans have a very interesting sense of style. Tweety and Teletubbies are common on adult t-shirts (I just passed a girl with the green teletubby and “I love being green”), and older women like to wear tight black t-shirts with cities or strange English spelled out in silver sequins (“Paris”, “Music My Life”).
I’ve seen very few Italian children, but most are still pushed around in strollers at age 6 or 7 and sport enormous pacifiers. Or they ride on the front of their mom’s bike, which is very cool–but only works if you have one kid! I should have tried that with Tommy while I had the chance.
Florence is basically a huge tourist trap. A beautiful, old, cultural one, but a tourist trap. In Rome, I had the sense that there were thousands of tourists at the main sights, but there were Roman people doing normal, real-life stuff. Here in Florence, there seem to be two categories: tourists, and Florentines making their living off of tourists. Maybe that’s why our dinners have been mediocre, surrounded by American tourists who loudly demand olive oil with their bread and salads before the main course.
But we are having fun, and I have high hopes for dinner tonight. Stay tuned…