My room had sort of a slow morning even though we should’ve planned it out better.
We woke up, went to breakfast, and got to the bus with our luggage much later than expected. We were supposed to leave extra early because of the impending closures due to Angela Merkel’s visit to Assisi. Departure from our hotel ended up being 15 minutes later than Matteo wanted, but once we hit our rest stop we found out that we were making good time and were expected to actually arrive in Florence earlier than scheduled. How about that~
I didn’t really have much to expect in Florence, but we reached the basilica in the main piazza and it was… beautiful. I say that descriptor a lot, but I really mean it. It’s a very tall building with pleasant colors and it was so photogenic.
As usual, there was a little bit of time for a lunch break, but I bought a sandwich from the rest stop during the drive to Florence so we settled on looking for a café to sit at instead of a restaurant. The café was called Caffé Melagioco and it was hidden in one of the many side streets.
Casey had been having a rough time physically. Not only did she have a lot of medication to take that would suppress what might be bronchitis, but she also broke her toe right before we left for Italy and eventually ended up spraining her foot due to all the walking we’d been doing. We found a supermarket on the way while looking for a café and were able to bandage Casey’s foot.
Anyway, back to the café. At first it seemed like they weren’t really ready for customers. There was a person measuring the doorway with a measuring tape, but another who greeted us as we stopped in front of the shop. The cashier/barista took our order and sat us outside to wait for our drinks.
She came over with our coffees and even included these cute little cookies. After getting to relax at the café, we walked back to our meeting point in the piazza and started our walking tour.
The tour included getting to visit the Duomo in Florence where we got to see the famous statue of David. Did it take me a while to connect the dots when the tour guide told us that the statue was referring to David and Goliath? You bet it did!
We had dinner in a reserved pizzeria, where I feared for my life because I hadn’t had pizza in almost 2 years because I was afraid it would make my stomach cramp. Thankfully it didn’t do that… maybe American pizza is just too much for me? We went back to the hotel where I spent the night watching Eurovision and doing my laundry. I didn’t actually get to watch much of Eurovision, but it was interesting finally getting to watch it in real time after hearing so much about it online. It was nice getting to do laundry and have fresh clothes even though it costed me like 10 Euros, but I’ll take what I can get. Listening to TV that wasn’t in English was a bit hard to follow so we eventually switched the channel to BBC. Something must’ve been wrong that day though because the signal wasn’t the best and it made it seem like the anchor was scatting whilst talking about a gun shooting in Paris.
Tomorrow is our free day in Florence so expect a lot of shopping and eating?