Free day in Florence means we’ll take advantage of our time and do as much a possible, right? Not exactly. Everyday is usually jam packed with activities and by 7PM we’re all exhausted but still have to head over to dinner and a short group meeting.
My roommates (Casey, Kayla) and I intended on at least sleeping until 9AM so we could still make it to breakfast (which ended at 10AM). We ended up finally all waking up past 1PM. Most of the day spent resting, but we really needed it.
We wanted the day to shop in the nice stores around Florence so there wasn’t a rush. I did forget that it was Mother’s Day and also a Sunday so most smaller shops and restaurants weren’t even open.
I found out that I broke my sunglasses the night before so my first course of action was to head over to H&M to replace them.
Missing breakfast and the usual lunchtime left us all extremely hungry and lightheaded. So we tried searching for a café on Google Maps but it led us to a tea shop, not necessarily a café.
The best shops and cafés I’ve ever been to are usually the ones that are unplanned. We stumbled upon this one café called Caffé Condotta and had some coffee and sandwiches. These were particularly my favorite because it seemed to be made with focaccia bread~
After our late lunch we finally got to roam around to the different shops. No plan in place except for a souvenir pin for Casey’s sister, but that would come much later.
Before heading back to the hostel/hotel we wanted to go back to that café for gelato, where the woman gave us free cookies, but she wasn’t working today and whoever was working had their friends over and it was really loud and busy. Another reoccurring theme for our time in Florence.
We received our dinner cash dole from Matteo after randomly bumping into him in the hotel lobby and went back into the room to rest.
I heard that there was a pool, Turkish bath, and sauna in the hostel so naturally I was curious. We’d been walking so much for the past seven days that the sauna sounded more and more appealing the longer I thought about it.
The sauna was pretty relaxing. My muscles felt better and my skin felt good too. At that point it was sort of late so none of us wanted to venture out too far for dinner. There was an Irish pub across the street where we found ourselves eating burgers and hot dogs. At first, it was mostly people from our Point Park group inside enjoying drinks, but then a larger group of students from another university barged in and suddenly I was regretting every decision made to get to this point.
Tomorrow we’re heading out to Venice so I figured it would be best to actually pack ahead of time so I wasn’t rushing~