When we woke up from our comas in the morning, we discovered we had no electricity. If only I knew this was going to be the start of my electricity woes. We ate some granola bars we had packed and headed to the subway station. This was our first, and surprisingly only, run-in we had with gypsies or people trying to dupe us. A gypsy bought our subway tickets for us and did a little slide of hand and took some of our money too. Dave saw her do it and just figured it would go better as a tip than arguing over the money. She did ask us for a tip and Dave said he had tipped her already. We’ll just call her our travel agent.
We grabbed the subway and headed to the Duomo, or cathedral. It was outstanding! So ornate. We walked completely around the outside, through the inside, and then got tickets and climbed to the top of it. Check out the pictures.
We took the subway back after being harassed by some street vendors, got our complimentary breakfast, and checked out of our hotel. We had booked this hotel through AAA and our travel agent had done it incorrectly. She had booked us for only one person instead of two and we had to pay an additional 25 Euro for me. After checking out we went to the train station and took the train to Florence.
We arrived in Florence around 5:00pm and walked about a mile to our hotel. The streets were crowded with vendors and tourists. We stayed at the Hotel Balestri which was on the river closed to the Ponte Vecchio bridge.
The hotel room was unique, to say the least. The bed was only a mattress and it was as hard as a rock. The bathroom had a bathtub but it did not have a showerhead. Instead the showerhead was on one of the bathroom walls between the toilet and the bidet. So when we took our showers during the day, the entire bathroom got wet.
Our first afternoon/evening we watched a parade of Ferrari’s from our hotel room. I guess there was some swanky party going on that evening sponsored by Ferrari. Dinner was across the river at I Tarocchi, which was pizza and wine. There were some obnoxious college girls sitting behind us at dinner and were loudly talking about looking for a party, getting drunk, and making out with Italian guys. I thought they were pretty rude, but I’m sure that happens all the time in touristy European cities. We turned in around 11:00pm.
(More pictures to come!!)
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