Saturday, September 5, 2015

Florence - Day Two

Woke up this morning with plans to stay another night at our hotel - it was possible but we would have to move rooms and pay more. No problem. Yes problem - we couldn't leave our luggage there. Really? I/we decide that that's dumb and we would prefer to try our luck elsewhere. We pack our bags and head out, eventually after thirty minutes or so of wandering (don't ask, our sense of direction was abysmal today) we close in on a gorgeous little hotel. I leave Willy on the street with the bags and ask if they might have room for us - they do, it's the last room, and we can afford it! Done. Can we leave our bags? No problem. Easy as.

We leave the hotel with smiles on our faces and proceed to get very, very lost. For almost an hour we walk in very large circles. The mood goes from: "Almost there, just around this corner!", to "Haha, we are so lost right now.", to " Ok, this is getting dumb now.", and at the "Get me out of this bloody place." stage a lovely elderly Italian woman took pity on us. She spoke no English at all, but chatted away to us in Italian. Best of all she showed us how to get to the Domeo. Thank god. We pulled our slightly trampled spirits out of the gutter and power walked our way there. We had walked around the outside of the Domeo the day before and it took our breath away, it's such an incredible feat of engineering, such an incredibly beautiful piece of engineering, it's quite awe inspiring just to exist in the same space. Having now been inside, as beautiful and wonderful as it was, I think the outside is still my favourite. We did climb to the top of both the tower and dome though which was pretty amazing, and a GREAT workout. The amount of graffiti is sickening, it is literally everywhere, I cannot for the life of me understand why people would climb several hundred steps to get to the to of an incredibly impressive building that's hundreds of years old just to draw their initials on the marble work. It makes me so mad.

We hit the Galleria next, it was great, another wonderful space filled with incredible artwork from the past 800 years (approximately)... David was amazing, I am so pleased that I made the effort to see him (despite having seen two very good reproductions since we arrived) however having done the National Gallery in London only a week before most of the rest of the artwork feel rather same same which made me feel a bit guilty for not enjoying it more.

That night we went out for dinner and ended up in a restaurant in an ancient square with a string duet playing ridiculously romantic/sappy music (and doing it very well). The service at the restaurant was teeeeeeeeerrible, and the food was average, but it was still a pretty magical time. On our walk home we happened upon a really strange street performance involving a Charlie Chaplin type of character and a little girl of maybe 8 or 9 years of age. Despite there not being any talking, it was very hard to get the gist of what was meant to be happening- the kid was great and I assumed it was a grandfather/granddaughter act, however at the end he helps her out of her costume and she races back to her parents, so we're pretty sure she was just an audience member after all.

Finally we get back to our hotel, it's beautiful, has an ensuite AND aircon. BOOM.

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