Florence Nightin-fineweather

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Hello everybody!

You have no idea how much I wanted it to be windy in Florence so that I could have called this blog "Florence Gale-in-Night", but it just wasn't to be unfortunately. The weather is fine. Hot in fact.

But still no internet, so no pictures.

We didn't do a lot today, we seem to get very cranky when we arrive at new places...and the fact that the Italian public servants hate me doesn't help...we always get lost, can't work out where we want to go on the bus, or even how to get on the bus, and I get frustrated and decide to walk to the accommodation. This is invariably a BAD decision.

Today in particular.

Unfortunately, in Venice, the handle you drag the suitcases along with stopped working on Susie's bag, so we can't pull it up now, so instead there's a little strap that we fastened to the bag and I was dragging it along with that - if it was somebody else it would have been funny, because every three steps it would hit my foot and roll over and I'd whisper a bad word, fix it up, and then walk another 3 steps. And in between those three steps, it would smack me in the calves, so it wasn't funny at all.

Anyway, that was how the bag was walking to the accommodation in Florence, which was about 1.5km away from the train station. Except this time, after about 500 metres, the bit that the strap was fastened to snapped as well. So I was very cross.

BUT - it resulted in me coming up with an ingenius solution - both the bags ended up attached to one another in a trailer setup and so I could carry both bags, without any trouble at all. It was funny watching the locals as I walked past. The young ones were clearly amused, but wanted to make sure they didn't wreck their perfect record of being completely sour around me, so they checked their smiles and kept walking. The old locals were great thought. The would point and laugh, and make interesting comments. At first I thought they were being cruel, but I later discerned that they weren't laughing, they were marvelling. They were, in their own Italian way, looking at what I had done, and commending me on the wisdom I was showing beyond my years, and my practical problem solving abilities. I know that's not true, but it's all I have left to convince myself the Italians could be nice people if you got to know them.

Anyway, when we got to the accommodation, we were wrecked, so we just relaxed and later went to get some dinner. Didn't really see very much, except a nice pizza and some pretty good pasta. Oh, I've taken to having wine with every meal. It's a very good idea.

That's all. Hope everybody is well

Bye bye

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