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Published: April 30th 2010
On our first day in Florence, we arrived at about 12.30 after a three hour train ride from Venice. We caught a taxi to the hostel (since trying to carry all our stuff there only ends in tears, literally, the bags really hurt after about ten minutes of lugging them through uneven cobbled streets). We couldn't check in because our room wasn't ready, so we left our bags and headed out to see Florence.
We walked towards the Accademia Galleria, the home of Michelangelo's David, and stood in a very short line to get into the museum. There are no photos allowed in the museum, so sorry that there aren't any of the sculpture on here, but I will try to describe it. From what I remember, 'David' is over 5 metres tall, and we were so amazed when we walked into the room that I didn't even notice the other sculptures lining the walls as you walk up to 'David'. The detail is just amazing. On something that size you would notice if the detail wasn't there, but even the veins in his hands, and the lines carved into his body were amazingly intricate. We spent a long time
in there just looking and moving around the statue.
I think the museum made a bit of a mistake putting David so close to the entrance though. While we really enjoyed Michelangelo's other sculptures when we went back to look at them, almost all of the rest of the artwork we saw (mostly the paintings) just seemed pompous. There wasn't the same stark clean reality to them - they were all covered in gold and everyone in them had halos around their heads.
Compared to the statue of David, they just seemed to be glorifying the people in them, and whatever they had done, whereas 'David' just showed an ordinary man, who God used to hold the sling in his hand. Simple. No glory (despite how huge he was!) and not arrogant or pompous.
We only spent about another half hour in the museum after we finished looking at the sculptures, even though we went right to the end, there wasn't anything that really made us just stand and gaze at it. Still, it was well worth it just for that.
As we left, there were street merchants with their "artwork" lining the streets. They are actually just prints
that they try to tell people are real paintings, and they start off trying to sell for around 20 euro. We just laughed at them and said no way. We didn't actually want any as we were quite hungry and just wanted to find food. But business must have been slow - one of them followed us all the way down the street having a one-sided bartering argument where he kept dropping the prices. It went very quickly down to 15 euro, and then down to 10, and then (without us even saying anything other than, "we really don't want them") he took his price down one euro at a time down to 4 euro! So a word of advice - don't ever pay more than 3 or 4 euro for these things! We thought we could have probably gotten him down to 2 or 3, but we genuinely didn't want the one he was chasing us with, and when we reached the end of the street, he finally left us alone and went back to harass the next poor person who happened to exit the museum.
By this time we were getting very hungry, and since it was
a Sunday it was very hard to find anything that was actually open, but we eventually did, and although it wasn't the best food, it was still food and we got full and happy and continued on to the markets.
There were stalls set up all around the church, so we had a short look, bought a tiny David statue, but didn't see anything else we wanted, since most of it was handbags and I had enough of those from Malaysia.
So we went back to the hostel to check in properly and decide what to do next. On the way back we walked past a park, and decided that after we had checked in we should get gelato and sit in the park. So once we had settled in our room (which had the weirdest bathroom ever - the toilet was so tall I could hardly use it and the entire room was covered in tiny little tiles) we went back out to find a gelato shop.
We found one that looked suitably good and had a lot of choices, and Danny got two scoops of gelato. I got six - chcolate mint, anilla, cinnamon, oreo, caramel, and
another one I can't remember. It was so yummy! I felt like the cinnamon was a bit of a risk, but it was very nice (although a bit strong) and it probably took me about a half hour to eat the whole thing.
We walked to the park (very slowly as I was concentrating on eating my gelato and cannot walk fast while doing such a consuming task) and then sat underneath a tree and finished off our gelatos.
Then I read a book for a while and Danny snoozed on the grass. We then walked over to another park which Danny had seen on his map. It had a weird rock-fountain in the middle of it, so we sat in the shade for a while and watched the people around us and they funny things they did.
We saw one man sleeping with his shoes as a pillow, and two brothers (who were in at least their 30's) taking photos of one another with the fountain. We were cracking up watching them because they would have the most serious faces (no smiling in the photo!) and then would look at the camera, not be happy with the photo,
and take another one. I think they took about five of the exact same pose before they were happy with the very grim photo.
We found a really yummy restaurant for dinner and decided that we had eaten far too much pizza and pasta in the last few days, so we got meat dishes. They were so good, although they do roast potatoes very differently here to what we do in Australia. They are all soggy instead of being nice and crispy.
We had a nice relaxing walk home, and found Duff Beer in one of the shops - so of course we bought some and Danny tried it when we got back to the hostel. He said it tasted pretty good, but I think the novelty was just in the name!
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Erin Corkery
non-member comment
Pillows
Erm... I'm pretty sure I used my shoes as a pillow at some stage in Europe. And everything else in my pack for that matter. Don't knock it til you try it! Good times :) Hope you guys enjoy and cherish the end of your trip.