(Day 4) The best dinner of our trip

---

Okay, just so you know, most of this entry is going to be about dinner. It was really fantastic!

But, before we get to dinner we have to get up in the morning. We didn't have a lot on the agenda for today. We visited some outdoor markets, I got a new leather coat (yay me!!), and we wandered and ate gelato (of course). One thing I did want to do since we had the time was visit a few more museums. I really wanted to go to the Uffizi Gallery but the line was wrapping around the building. I'll just plan on going another time with some friends and make reservations beforehand. We went to the Bargello, which is a museum with pretty much only sculptures in it. It's one of the lesser-known museums so there was no wait and the tickets were pretty cheap. Matt was humoring my new-found love of sculptures...isn't he the best??

Florence has turned out to be one of our favorite cities and we had no problem killing time until our dinner reservations at 7:30. We showed up a little early, hoping we could be seated and discovered that the restaurant didn't open until 7:30! I had forgotten that the Italians eat so late. So, we came and were, of course, seated right away. Well, because Italians eat so late and this was still early to them, the restaurant was full of tourists. I think probably 90% of the people eating there at that time of the evening were native English speakers. Italians also don't seat you at your own private table. You may end up elbow to elbow with a stranger during your meal, which can be a fun way to meet new people. We sat next to two women from the States. They had been college roommates and now lived in two different states (New York and Massachusetts) and were on vacation together. The one girl was going to write a book about food and wine after the trip (she owned a wine store in the States and was in the middle of a divorce from her chef husband...hence the vacation without him). It was really nice to chat with them on and off throughout dinner.

Now, on to the food. First of all, we really lucked out and got a server that spoke spectacular English or we would have been there quite a long time while I used my little menu decoder to try and figure out the menu. She explained it all to us and moved the ordering process right along 😊 Acqua al 2 (which has also recently opened in San Diego, by the way) is big on samplers so we ordered the pasta sampler and the salad sampler and shared. There really isn't enough for two people but we wanted to try everything. You get a few bites of 5 different pastas and I think 4 different salads. For our main course Matt got the blueberry steak and I got a port chicken. The steak really was blueberry...it was a sort of blueberry steak sauce. I didn't try the steak (I haven't had one since 1993 and I'm not about to ruin my record now) but I did dip my bread in the sauce to try it and it was really good. Matt said the steak was good as well. My chicken had some sort of a port wine sauce on it and was delicious. With our meal we got a small bottle of the house red, Chianti Classico, and Matt got a Pepsi, although he did try some of the wine. We even splurged after dinner and got the dessert sampler (heavenly) and I got a glass of the dessert strawberry wine, which even Matt liked as it wasn't too sweet like a lot of dessert wines are. For all of that food it didn't break the bank and it was really the only nice dinner we had the entire trip so we didn't feel the least bit guilty about it 😊

Before leaving we bought another small bottle of wine to take with us and headed back near the piazza we had been to the night before, as there was supposed to be live music again. There was quite a crowd again and we met more American exchange students and talked to them about their experiences living in Florence. Our singer from the previous night sang two songs and then, we think, was reunited with an old girlfriend and spent the rest of the night talking to her instead of singing. It was a disappointment but we had good conversation while we were sitting there waiting for him to come back so we didn't mind too much.

Tomorrow morning we leave Florence and head to Naples and Pompeii and we're going to be very sad to leave. I wish our whole trip had been longer. It would have been nice to have spent longer in both Cinque Terre and Florence but new adventures await and at least we got to see it.

Note: In case you're interested, here are the links for the restaurant locations in both Florence and San Diego.

http://www.acquaal2.it/2008/index.html
http://www.acquaal2.com/

---