and it was called yellow - coldplay

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highs
saw the 'david' sculpture (all 3 of them) and 'the birth of venus' painting
ate the best home made spinach and cheese ravioli ive ever tasted in florence
walked around the colesseum and the roman forum
saw the pope in st peters basillica, touched the feet of the statue of st peter and saw john paul ll's tomb
took a sneaky photo of the ceiling in the sistine chapel of the 'creation of adam' which is on my bedroom wall at home

lows
got woken up at 3am by 3 drunk canadian guys who were staying in my room
have the worst t-shirt tan line at the top of my arms
got bitten by a mozzie while I was sleeping and my eye puffed up
got very very drunk and consequently very very sick
went for 4 days without washing my hair cause the shower was freezing cold and ended up just changing hostels

people i've met
florence = janey, emilie and kristen from america; karen from chatswood; clara the hostel owner
certaldo = rachel from melbourne; nicole, collette, kelly (who was a guy), erin, john, chris, dave and liz all from america
rome = julia, jessica and amber from america


I've been trying to write this damn blog for about 2 weeks now and i'm not getting anywhere! I was supposed to have access to free internet in Florence but the computer was down, and then in Rome there was a time limit and as well as a long line of people breathing down my neck, so I gave up altogether. Now i'm in Verona and have been to Rimini and Venice since I started this blog, but at least the prices at the internet cafes here (along with just about everything else) are much cheaper than they are in the big touristy cities.

I'll tell you about Florence in a minute, but first I wanted to share with you (well for bec's sake at least) my one and only drinking story since i've been here. Truth is that I haven't been going out drinking because i'd rather spent my limited budget on sightseeing activities, and i'm not a really big drinker anyway, which may have been part of the problem...

So after Florence I headed into the Tuscan countryside for some R&R before I hit Rome and I met some really great people there which was great. The guesthouse had a pool (well it was just a small above ground one but I wasn't complaining) so the first thing I did when I got there was to go for a swim, and boy was I dying for a dip in this heat!

On the next day the Aussie guy that works at the guesthouse, who as it turned out was a real wino and had been working there each summer for the past 5 years, took us on a wine tour. I hate to be one of those 'mines better than yours' people but i'm not really a fan of the chianti that I tasted and much preferred the tour I did a couple of years ago around the Hunter Valley. But the drive around the countryside was nice and I had good company, so all in all it was a lovely afternoon.

The highlight for me was when we dropped into a little family run farm that specialised in making olive oil, and you won't believe me when I say it, but the oil was delicious. It wasn't like the oil we have at home that we use for cooking, it was more like extra extra extra extra virgin and is only used for marinating meat and garnishing dressings. They had a plain one, a chilli one, a garlic one, and a rosemary one and I was so tempted to buy a litre of them all but quickly remembered that it would be virtually impossible for me to carry them around and get them back to the UK, let alone to bring them back to Oz with me when I eventually come home.

That was also the day that I woke up to discover that i'd been bitten on my eyelid by a mozzie and the whole area surrounding my eye was all puffed up. I felt like a freak! but then I saw that everyone else had been bitten at least 10 times all over their faces and looked like they all had the chicken pox, so I didn't feel so bad anymore.

I had a fairly quiet one that night, and spent the next day snoozing in the hammock in the garden and swimming in the pool, so when the Americans invited me to their villa which was separate to the main house I headed down with the bottle of cheap rose wine i'd bought and feasted on the left over pasta they had cooked for dinner seeings as i'd been too lazt that day to go any buy myself something to cook for dinner. Pretty soon the mozzies started to feast on us and we retreated inside, and in true American style started playing drinking games. I polished off the bottle i'd brought with me and instead of being smart and stopping there, I let them top me up with the goon (cask wine) that they had bought, and pretty soon I was worshipping the porcelain god.

Thank god it wasn't far for me to go to get back to my bed, but the real problem was that I was due to leave at 9am the next morning and when my alarm went off I didn't know where the hell I was. I managed to drag myself out of bed at about 8.45 and miraculously packed my bag without forgetting anything, then trudged downstairs to catch a ride on the shuttle headed for town. I was about a half hour too early for the train that i'd planned on catching, and I couldn't bare the thought of getting on an earlier train with my stomach churning like it was, so I passed out on a nearby bench and I swear it felt like only 5 minutes had passed but it really was longer, when Rachel was waking me up to tell me that the train was coming.

I kept telling myself that I was fine on the train, but failed miserably and ended up worshipping the stainless steel god for a bit, but at least I felt heaps better for it. I said a quick goodbye to Rachel when we reached Florence and then we both went off in search of our connecting trains, hers to somewhere on the coast, and mine down to Rome. I reached Rome in desperate need of a siesta only to find that my room wasn't ready, so I dumped my bags and hopped onto the internet in the lobby but had no chance of writing anything comprehensive in a blog, so I just checked my email and surfed around a bit to kill some time.

When my room was finally ready the girl at the desk called me over and seemed taken aback when I audibly groaned after she mentioned that it was on the 4th floor (with no lift) and she must have felt sorry for me (or I must have really looked like crap) cause she offerred to carry my small backpack up the stairs for me. Needless to say, I dropped my bags and passed out on my bed for a couple of hours, then went in search of something greasy to fill my extremely empty stomach, and scoffed down a massive slice of pizza (when in rome...) before heading back to my room for a long overdue shower.

Now the showers in this place were a whole other story. To cut a long story short, there was never any hot water left by the time I went in, and after 2 days of having a 10 second stone cold shower I went in search of somewhere else to lay my weary (covered in unwashed hair) head. A couple of streets away was a hostel that I had heard of from one of the girls in my room in Florence, so I wandered over and booked the following 3 nights, then went back to the hostel to tell them that I was only going to stay one more night in accordance with their cancellation policy.

The guy at the desk looked up my original booking and couldn't understand why I was leaving after 3 nights when I had booked for 7 until I mentioned how unhappy I was about the shower situation. He actually smiled as soon as said it and I got the impression that he had heard the same story many many times before. Ironically the shower was luke warm when I had one that night but I was decided not to risk washing my hair just in case it turned freezing again right when I had shampoo in my eyes. The next day I checked into my new room at a hostel called Yellow and had a very long and very warm shower.

I had originally planned to stay in Rome for 10 nights, but Rachel who I met in Certaldo had raved about a hostel she stayed at in Rimini on the East Coast of Italy, so I decided to cut my stay to 7 days. The new hostel only had availability for 3 nights but they said that there would probably be a cancellation and i'd get a bed on the 4th night, but after about the 4th day i'd just about seen everything that i'd wanted to anyway, and when I went to the train station to book my ticket to Rimini they told me that a strike was planned for the day I wanted to leave, and that along with the sickening heat, sealed the deal for me to leave Rome after only 6 days.

You're probably thinking that 6 days in Rome is heaps, but for as long as i've been planning this trip Rome has been my ultimate destination and I wanted to see absolutely everything while I was there. I didn't realise that all the sights are really quite close to each other, and I saw everything in the first day that I was there that i'd planned to see over the first 2 or 3 days. That was actually a good thing though cause it meant that I had more time to see the things that I hadn't planned on seeing, or didn't know about until I got there, so I spent a day visiting the catacombes just outside the city which wasn't originally on my agenda.

I also visited the Musei Capitolini which has the big head, hand and feet from the giant statue of Constantine, the original She-wolf and Equestrian Marcus Aurelius statues (copies of which are in the Piazza outside), as well as a really interesting exhibition in the underground gallery about everyday Roman life, and I couldn't believe that no-one had told me how great that museum was before I got there! Other highlights included the Colosseum, Trevi Fountain, St Peters Basilica, Vatican Museums, Sistine Chapel, Spanish Steps, Victor Emmanuel Monument (aka the Wedding Cake), and Bocca Della Verita (aka the Mouth of Truth) as seen in one of my all time favourite movies - Roman Holiday.

Ok , so back to Florence - Well to start with, it´s been my favourite city so far. That´s probably got a lot to do with the place that I stayed in which was run by a lady in her early thirties and she was such a great host. When I first got there she gave me a free map of the city (the information centre made you pay for them!) and she explained all the important sights, museums, churches, etc, that she recommended that I see, and I tohought that was really great. There were also only half a dozen rooms in her place, but the rooms were really big, so it was really comfortable. She also got up early each morning (she had her own private room there) and cooked us a hot breakfast! I´m don´t really like scrambled eggs and bacon, but she also cooked a cake each morning, which was totally awesome!!

I also met some really great American girls there and so I had someone to have dinner with each night, but we went our own ways during the day cause we all wanted to see different things. I was there for a total of 7 nights, which was propbably a couple too many, but it also gave me the chance to have a lazy day where I just lazed around and read a book. And I also slept in a bit each day (after getting up for breakfast then going back to bed of course), so I went out exploring each afternoon and basically felt really relaxed there.

The second night there was the only crappy part, and that´s only because these 3 canadian guys that were staying in my room came back at 2am drunk as skunks and made a big racket. I understand that you have to put up with noise when you´re staying in a hostel but these guys were beyond acceptable as far as I was concerned. They kept coming in and out of the room, turning on the light, walking up and down the hallway and bumping into the walls and doors of the other rooms waking everyone else up as well. Then one of them came back in and went to bed, but not before he stood next to my bed trying to set his alarm by pressing something that beeped about a hundred times. Then another one came in, and then finally the last one who was out like light in about 5 minutes and started snooring. I got up and went over and hit him and told him to roll over (which he did) but he didn´t remember that I did that the next morning.

So all that coming and going lasted for about an hour, and of course I was wide awake by then, and do you think I could get back to sleep? not a chance. The next morning we all got up to eat our breakfast and they were going on about how sick they felt and how they had got in a fight while they were out and that their hand/head was hurting heaps, and I sat there looking across the table at the only other person in my room (who was a girl that was leaving that day anyway) and I was fuming! I decided to go and ask Clara if I could change rooms that day and she wanted to know why, so I told her that the guys in my room had come home drunk and noisy and I didn´t want to stay in the same room as them anymore (she said she hadn´t heard them cause she sleeps with ear plugs in), but instead of swapping me to another room, she got up and went in to tell them to pack their things and go!

The guys were heaps shocked, and so was I cause that´s not what I wanted her to do at all, but the guys actually had the nerve to ask me if they were really that bad, and as I was still pretty mad I said that they were the rudest guys i´d ever met. Meanwhile when I was out in the hallway a few of the other people who were staying in the other rooms stopped me and asked me if I was in the room with those guys, and said they felt sorry for me cause they had been woken up by the banging on their doors, so I knew I wasn´t over-exaggerating about the noise they made.

Anyway the guys must have gone out and apologised to Clara cause she let them stay but split them up into separate rooms, and I felt like the biggest bitch evertime I passed them in the hall. But other then that, I really enjoyed Florence. Compared to Rome, it felt more like an authentic Italian city, whereas Rome just felt like a huge tourist trap (and the heat and crappy hostel with no hot water didn´t help either).

Until next time...

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