Location: Florence, Italy
Florence was LOVELY yesterday. The temperature was perfect, not a cloud in the sky. It was great. I started the day late (after I finally caught up on all my sleep) and went to a cafeteria only to find... (drum roll please) a TURKEY sandwich!! I hadn't had turkey since before I left so I was so excited, and even though it was just a little sandwich with only cheese and turkey and it was €4 I was still so excited to eat turkey that I bought it. After this I got my first of many bowls of Gelato (Mango and Papaya today) and then I walked around and saw the Duomo and then walked down to a really interesting old outdoor museum. There were about 20 statues around and most of them were absolutely beautiful. The museum surrounded this big plaza in the center and then ran down the side towards the river.
All of the statues were authentic except for the one of David that I took the picture of. The actual statue of David is inside a museum a couple of blocks from my hostel and this one is located where the old David statue used to stand. A bunch of students recreated it and I think some people were genuinely confused as to whether they were looking at the real thing or not. Another statue that I took a picture of was another recreation (the close up on the warrior looking guy holding a dead guy). Except, this statue was created in like 640 AD which was amazing to me that a recreation of another statue still happened early enough to be it's own statue. Crazy!!
Also, everyone in most of these statues is naked. Well, let me rephrase that. Every statue in the ENTIRE city, the people are naked. I mean, these people are not modest in the slightest. And there are lots of statues with very obvious hints to homosexuality. Just right out in the middle of squares. Very vulgar things, but very interesting.
After this I walked down a long corridor (where I saw the smoking statue) and down to the river past another big museum. The river was so pretty and was lined with all of these Mediterranean Tuscan houses and the sun was setting and it was just perfect. I walked across the old bridge and over to a more residential area of town where there were a lot of really pretty lofts and churches. After this, I meandered my way back to where I came from and past a bunch of black market purse sellers.
Once I was back at my hostel, a girl in my room, Rain from China, was going to o up to the top of this Garden to watch the sunset so I said lets go, we got a bottle of wine and headed up. Unfortunately, we were a little late, so we're going to try again today, but we did sit up there and people watch and drink our little bottle. After this, we came back to the hostel, where the guy who owns the place was just getting off work so he asked if we wanted to go get some food, which of course we did, so we all walked back across the river to a cute little restaurant by the church with the violinist. We sat down at 8 and didn't leave until almost 11:30. I had the most amazing Gnocchi with a Radish and Gorgonzola sauce (it was incredible) and then we drank a ton of wine and had chocolate cake and just sat there and talked about (of course, get three drunk people from different countries together and what do you start talkin about) solving all of the worlds problems, the war in Iraq, communism... all very light topics for a first time dinner together ;)
Once we left, we went down to a couple different clubs and had a couple drinks before retiring relatively early (relative to Spain that is) at about 1:30.
Today, obviously, I have spent most of my day uploading pictures. It literally has taken me a couple of hours so be grateful. I'm gonna head out now and get some food... I think the word of the day is Pizza.
XOXO
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