Gelato, gelato, gelato…everywhere!

____ : Florence :: Starbucks : NYC

How’s that for an analogy? That should be on the GRE, I’d win. But really, there are gelato places EVERYWHERE here in Florence – at least 2 per block (one for each side of the street). So needless to say, we are having gelato more than once during this 3 day stay. I would like to have it twice a day but that unfortunately cannot happen. However, when we do have it…it basically constitutes a meal for the day. The first day we were here, we literally had bread for breakfast, gelato for lunch and bread for dinner. Yay for Europe on a budget. We did, however, have a real Italian meal last night! PASTA! Well pasta for Holly and I, Kayla had pizza and Kelly opted out for a cheaper means of eating – you guessed it, bread. I had my first (and probably last for this trip) glass of wine in Italy and basically just because it came with what I ordered – ravioli stuffed with a bean/potato mixture and topped with a meat and black cabbage sauce…it was really good. I had 4 large-ish raviolis with a glass of wine and I was totally stuffed, my stomach is definitely shrinking.

The train ride from Rome was good, I stayed awake so that I could see the scenery as we passed by and it gave me time to go through my pictures from Rome. Finding our hostel turned out to be an interesting and semi-difficult task. We made it to the street it was on and walked down it twice before coming to an unmarked part of the building that it could have been in – so we went in. Three flights of stairs later we started buzzing some random room that said ‘Veronique’ on it, the name of the hostel. Just when we decided to keep going up a guy comes running down the stairs, lo and behold, it’s the hostel guy. Long story short, our hostel is basically an apartment building. We have our own room within an apartment room type thing and there are two bathrooms that everyone shares. We even have our own keys to the building, the lift, the apartment and our room in the apartment. Kind of cool, kind of weird.

Shortly after checking in we went out to explore Florence and ended up making our way to the Ponte Vechhio – a famous pedestrian bridge with shops on it. All of the shops actually on the bridge are jewelry, the street basically glistens with gold, silver, diamonds and other various jewels. After more walking and passing at least 12 gelato places, we stopped to get some. This time I got pistachio and chocolate…delicious. They also had a Nutella one, which was also delicious according to Kayla and Holly. Post-gelato, Kayla and I went to the Uffizi gallery while Holly and Kelly explored more of the city. The gallery was awesome, so many paintings and sculptures. Unfortunately the David is in the Accademia so we haven’t gone to see him – we are a little too cheap and we can’t take pictures. We figured the Uffizi was a little more worth it with everything that was in there – although we still couldn’t take pictures. There are two replicas of the David around the city, both of which we saw, so we were okay with that.


Ponte Vecchio


Uffizi Gallery!!


One of the replicates of David in Florence (left)

Friday was supposed to be our trip to Pisa, but we all fell asleep early and slept through all alarms trying to get us up, so basically it turned into a chill day of wandering around. Holly met up with a friend from Harvard and we met her later at the bridge. Before we met up with her we went up to the Piazzale Michelangelo for a fantastic view of the city. We had also decided not to go up into the Duomo, so this was a good alternative for a view of the city. We had to trudge up a hill for 10 minutes to get there, but it was worth it. :) The other replicate of the David is there, and is green…assuming they made it in copper or something. Last night we went back down to the Ponte Vecchio for sunset (which is at 9pm, a bit closer to NY time than the 11pm sunset in Ireland) and it turned out to be the thing to do. There was a band and people dancing – so much fun! We are going again tonight. We also got a little carried away with the fireworks setting on our cameras…there are a couple pictures below for examples.


Part of the Duomo from the outside - looks so cool.


View of the city from Piazzale Michelangelo


Kelly, Kayla and I


Sunset!



Fun with camera settings...

Seeing that Pisa didn’t happen yesterday, it was supposed to happen today. Clearly by that statement, it did not – but it was on our own accord. We booked hostels last night for Scotland, which was a little depressing to the bank accounts…or will be, and we had already decided we weren’t going to pay the 15 euro to climb the tower anyway. So we basically would have been spending 12 – 15 euro to get out there, which isn’t that bad but when all we were going to do was look at it, we decided against it. So in the end we have made Florence our recovery time. It has been non-stop and quite intense since we arrived in Europe and we needed some chill days. It would have been cool to see the tower, but I’m also fine spending that money on something else too. The rest of today will probably consist of more wandering and photo ops, then to find what Sari deems as the best gelato place in Florence. I hope we find it – it’s my dinner.


Apparently it's a thing here to place a padlock by the Ponte Vecchio to signify eternal love...I just thought they looked cool.


I adore small cars, I absolutely love these tiny trucks...

We are leaving for Parma tomorrow and we are staying with one of Holly’s friends for a couple days. From there we go to Venice! Internet is going to be non-existent in Parma we are told and it looks like they are charging an arm and a leg for it in the hostel we are staying at in Venice. Soooo for all the parents, I will probably buy a little internet once in Venice so that we can send out email notifying you of our existence but blogs and updates will be scarce past that. We arrive in Venice on the 21st and leave on the 24th for Amalfi…we’ll see how internet goes from then on. Good news is that we should have internet consistently when we arrive in Scotland on until we come home. Happy Father’s Day shout out to my dad for tomorrow!!

Fun Fact: The only hindering aspect about Florence…it smells…not consistently, but there are waves of it in the air that are rather unappealing.