Florence

I have not been the best at keeping this up this summer and I am truly sorry. I have had a busy and fun 2 months!

After Rome came Florence!

We took the train to Florence and it was a bit of a crazy bit. We found a train that went to Florence and a lady even directed us there (although we should have known better because we had to give her money after she took us to the wrong train). Thankfully, we figured out 20 minutes before our train was supposed to depart that we were on the wrong one, hopped off and were off for the right one.

Overlooking Florence

The train took about 3 hours and the hostel was a lot easier to find this time. We stayed at Hotel Marcella and it was a lot easier to find that the hostel in Rome BUT it was up 6 flights of stairs. The old man who owns the place was a huge sweetheart but he did not speak English. He did however, have a bottle opener when we mistakenly bought a bottle of wine without having the nice people in the store to open it.

So we went off on a journey through Florence. It was very nice and picturesque and very relaxing compared to Rome and I liked it a lot better than Rome. We went to El Dumo and took a CitySightSeeing in Florence. They took my nice pretty ticket from Rome for a small discount for Florence.

El Dumo

While we were in Florence, Pisa was so close we couldn't resist taking a half day trip over on the bus. Even though Pisa is extremely famous for the leaning tower, there really wasn't much to the town so after an hour or two we hopped back on the bus to Florence.

Pisa

The last day we were there, we decided to visit the art galleries that housed Michelangelo’s David and the Gallery Uffizzi which had the Birth of Venus and a lot of other famous works that I remember learning about in high school . It took forever to get into the two places though! I am really glad we left the galleries until the last day because we needed the entire day to wait in line. To wait for Michelangelo we stood in line for about an hour. I really didn’t like Michelangelo’s David as much as I thought I would. I thought his hands were so disproportionate from the rest of his body, but then again that is just me.

The Gallery Uffizzi was a pain in the bottom. Because we didn’t book our tickets beforehand, we stood in line to get tickets for 5 hours but it was worth it! I’m pretty sure we spent as much time in the Gallery as we did waiting in line and we were exhausted that night. And we made friends with a lovely American family. They were on their fourth time to Italy as a family, the father worked in NYC while the rest of the family lived in Alabama.

We headed off early the next day and made our way back to England.