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Published: April 26th 2010
Me and the Gates of Paradise
The Gates of Paradise are some doors of the Baptistery in Florence. This is the goldiest of the doors.We took a plane from Istanbul to Florence. Nothing really happened.
We spent a month in Florence. It was really fun.
What I liked best. I think I liked best when Mark and Joy and Peyton came. And we went on a daytrip to San Gimignano.
San Gimignano is a teeny little hill-town that has the best ice cream in the world, and wonderful views over lots of countryside.
A hill-town is a little walled-in town at the top of a hill. The buildings were three or four stories, and they were old-looking. The streets were little and cobble-stoned, and there weren’t many cars, almost no cars. There were a couple of big squares where you could sit, and a couple of churches.
There were lots and lots of towers. There used to be 72 towers, and now there are 17. The towers looked sort of like castle lookout towers.
Anyway, we took a bus from Florence to San Gimignano, and strolled around for a while.
We went up the hill to an old fort, and ate a nice picnic lunch.
After we finished lunch, we went down and
got ice cream. The ice cream in Italy is very, very good. This place was the best in the world. Ella got chocolate and caramel and cinnamon, and I shared it with her. It was delicious.
We ate our ice cream, and then went on a walk with pretty views of the countryside. The countryside had lots of green hills with trees and little farmhouses and fields. It was all very green and pretty and peaceful and calm and nice. It was nice to be out in the sloping hills and countryside.
It was fun to be with Joy and Mark and Peyton. It was fun to go on the walk, and the ice cream was really good. It was a beautiful day. And it’s just a nice, really cute small town.
What I liked least. Nothing was bad, really. But I didn’t love Pisa. Pisa was not quite as fun as the rest. Everything we did in Florence was so charming and nice, but Pisa was just not as cute and not as charming.
Pisa is a town about an hour’s train ride from Florence. It’s famous for it’s Leaning Tower. We went up
it, and it was neat.
Everywhere else we went - Florence, San Gimignano, Siena - felt like nothing had changed since the 1400s. But Pisa felt more like a normal town, which was fine, but it wasn’t as fun, really.
We had plenty of fun there; it just wasn’t as fun as Florence, Siena, or San Gimignano.
It’s hard to say what’s the least fun you had in a fun place.
The most fun I had. Strolling around Florence. Florence was an extremely cute small city that was mostly pedestrian.
It was pretty, and had lots of medieval-looking buildings that were fun to look at. There were also lots of squares, and some were extremely nice.
It was nice to stroll around. It seems like it was meant for strolling around and having fun.
There was something that’s hard to describe about the little streets and squares every block. The buildings were just so pretty. It was just so pretty and cute and nice.
It was like a bigger version of San Gimignano, except for not hilly.
It was just neat to walk around a city that looks like you had
gone back in time to the 1400s. But it’s also nice and new and fancy too. The buildings look old, but everything is still modern and fancy.
The most like home. The Europe-ness of it. I had thought Istanbul was just like home, and then we got to Florence, and it seemed even more like home.
The people looked just like us. Also, the language was almost exactly like Spanish. You could look at a sign and guess how to pronounce it, and whatever you guessed was probably right - whereas anywhere else that was not possible.
The food was pizza and pasta and pesto and ice cream. It was all stuff that we eat all the time at home. That hasn’t been true anywhere else we’ve been.
It was a smaller city. We’ve been in all these monstrous cities, and it was nice to be somewhere where you didn’t feel overwhelmed by the size. Florence is about the size of Raleigh, but it seemed smaller because the historic center was very small. Most of the other cities we’ve been in are way bigger than any city in the US. For instance, Shanghai has around 20
million people; Istanbul has 12 million people; New York City has 8 million people. And Istanbul felt small, compared the big cities of Asia.
Also, in Florence you could go in a store and look around without the workers bothering you. In other places, when you go in a store, the workers come up and start recommending something or other that you don’t want, and generally trying to distract you. They’re trying to help, but it’s not very helpful to us. It felt like unless you were going to buy something, you couldn’t go in a store.
The weirdest thing about Florence. That’s hard. I don’t think anything was weird.
Actually, the weirdest thing was to have other people, besides just us, to talk to.
For the last 10 days in Florence, Joy and Mark and Peyton came to visit us.
It seemed like before they came, we just sort of talked about the same things over and over and over again.
But when they came, we talked about different things, because they had different things to talk about.
It was very fun, but also kind of strange, because we had been talking
about the same things over and over and over again for 7 months.
The cutest thing I saw. The very being of Florence. Florence was so small and cute. It was like being in something that was re-created to be cute, except that it was real.
It was like a building that had been preserved, except that it was a whole town - and there were normal people doing normal things there.
The best food I ate. That’s really tricky. I have three things.
The food in Florence is delicious. Italian food is delicious.
Ice cream. Every night we would go out for a stroll, and get ice cream. Every place we got it was absolutely delicious. I think San Gimignano’s was the best.
Every night when we got the ice cream, we would say, “Oh this is the best, this is the best.” And then the next night we would say, “Oh this is the best, this is the best.” Every ice cream was so good it seemed like the best.
It was better than ice cream in the US. It was sort of creamier, and had more flavor. Ohh, it was
sooo good. It was insane how good it was.
Fresh pasta with sausage sauce. The fresh pasta was delicious. We would go to a market and get a kilo of pasta, and go back to the apartment and eat it for dinner.
My favorite kind was about the size and shape of fettucini. It was called tagliatelle. It was good with anything on it, but my favorite was when it had a sausage tomato sauce. The sauce and the pasta were both delicious, and they were even more delicious together.
The fresh pasta was way better than pasta in the US. In the US, they make it, dry it, package it, and put it in grocery stores. In Italy, they make it fresh that morning, but don’t dry it. You buy it and boil it that night. It’s like the difference between fresh bread right out of the oven and the loaf-white package bread from the grocery store.
After a month of eating fresh pasta every night, I never got tired of it. Purple Cows love fresh pasta.
Pizza. For lunch on Mark’s birthday, we went to a pizza place. It was by far the
best pizza I have ever had.
Me and Ella shared a pizza with ham and cheese on it. It was fresh pizza crust - we watched the chef make the pizza - and delicious ham and delicious cheese.
It was mouth-wateringly, deliciously wonderful. It is more home-made than most pizzas at home.
The weirdest food I ate. I can’t think of anything weird that we ate. I think we’re out of weird food territory.
The most interesting thing I did. We went on a daytrip to Venice. I thought it was quite strange that a city can be a functioning city when there is more water than land.
Venice is a city built on a bunch of little islands in a marsh. There were lots of little teeny waterway canals between islands, so you had to cross bridges a lot. There were no cars. Instead of trash trucks or buses there were trash boats and water buses.
There were no big roads, and there weren’t many open spaces. There mostly little alleys.
It was a really fun daytrip. Mostly we strolled around and explored and got lost. It was neat to see a
city where instead of roads there were canals.
Where we slept. We stayed in an apartment. It was big and had a big bedroom, a living room with a foldout couch, a kitchen, and a large hallway.
It was in a really good location, but everywhere in Florence was in a good location because the historic center is so small.
It wasn’t such a big deal to be an apartment as it had been before, because we had already been in one for a month. In Chiang Mai and Istanbul, it was a very big deal to be in an apartment, because we had living in hostel and guesthouse rooms for a long time. Here we had come from another nice apartment in Istanbul.
Where we ate. We ate at our apartment. We ate in. We really only ate out once.
Eating out was expensive in Florence, so we always ate in. But the food was so good, it didn’t matter. We ate fresh pasta for dinner and sandwiches for lunch.
How we got around. We walked around Florence. We didn’t need to go anywhere that was far away, so it was very easy
to walk everywhere.
When we took daytrips, we took buses and trains.
Italian money. Italian money is called Euros. Most countries in Europe use the Euro. $1.50 in US money equals 1 Euro. Things are much more expensive in Europe than anywhere else we’ve been.
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Mom
non-member comment
glad to Patsy again
Dear Patsy, I am glad to read about your impressions and opinions of Florence. Sounds like a good place for purple cows and people too. Can't wait to hear about what you think about Paris. xoxo Mom