Forging our way to Florence!

Florence!

Departing the perfumery, we weaved our way along cliff tops, tore through tunnels (have never seen so many tunnels in my life!! - at first they were fun - then they became annoying as it became hard to read my book - the tunnel lights caused a strobe effect - thought I would have an epileptic fit!) and barrelled along bridges. The scenery and roadways were amazing. The road just goes across the side of a really steep hill side - giant arched bridges carried us over massive valleys - then the tunnels bored into the next ridge line, to be carried on another bridge again. It must have taken many years to build the road system. Before this, you would have needed to follow a very wriggly coastline.

Border checks were virtually non existent - the strictest place was UK/French border. We sailed from France straight into Italy without blinking an eye. One thing that was different was the way you were served in service stations. The attitude of the attendant was one thing - as was the stupid system! You had to look at the food through a glass fridge, then queue up to pay for it - you had to tell them in Italian what you wanted. You then needed to line back up at the counter, get grunted at by the attendant, hand over your receipt then finally get your food!
Another thing I am not sure if I mentioned yet, was he fact that you had to pay for toilets when you used them. If you did not, some of the toilet attendants (ahh, what a job) would get surly with you. Their purpose was MEANT to mean that the toilet was always clean - this was not always the case. We learnt that the best thing to do was use the toilet, then pay on the way out - if you thought it was good enough. I had great satisfaction using a dirty toilet, then upon leaving, throwing a handful of now useless Swiss Francs into their bowl!!

We wended down the coast and went through one of the biggest sea ports of the area - Genoa - we did not stop though. I saw container after container of terracotta pots being made ready for shipment to good old down under - also saw a heap of tractors and ag equipment. Here’s a link to the port - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genoa

The country side began to change as we moved into the Tuscany region - rolling hills and olive groves. After about 9 hours on the bus - fun, fun, fun - we made it to Florence - then we drove through it to our campsite 9kms from town. This was the first time we had been to a camp like this - it had about 4 restaurants, a bar, 6 pools, and catered to large groups of people and families. To use the facilities, you had to charge up a card and then flash it against a card reader to pay for stuff. It would have been nice if the tour guide remembered to tell us - cos we pissed a few store owners off trying to pay cash.

We had our first massive Italian feed that night - pizza, pasta and red wine. Then we hit the onsite bottleo and bought a bottle of vodka for 7 Euros! It was back to our miniscule cabins then for some drinks. I was a little bit tired from the bus - I was about the only one to have stayed awake the whole trip - so I hit the sack early - listening to the annoying Americans just outside of the cabin crapping on about how good they were.

Florence link - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florence

The next morning, we cruised into Florence for an organised walking tour. Normally we had a couple of things organised, then we could have free time to explore the city in our own time. We were warned about “Stendhal Syndrome” as we pulled into town - this link will describe it - lucky for me I did not get it - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stendhal_syndrome

The walking tour was great - even though it was raining and cold. It sort of made the old buildings seem more realistic. The sun did come out later and made a great day. The architecture and the statues sprinkled through the town were awesome. With our walking tour over, Mark, a new friend called Kate and I slipped away from the group. There were some annoying clingers on - so this was our only option J . We trekked away from the old town and made it to their university. It was still a little cold and wet, so we decided it was time for coffee and lunch. We found this large building which held a heap butchers, bakers, restaurants and fish mongers. With our broken Italian, we ordered our meals - I ended up getting “bread salad” by mistake (mine). It was stale bread mixed with salad and vinegar - quite tasty really.

After lunch, we slipped back into the main square - none of our tour was in sight! We climbed the main dome - which was pretty spectacular - there’s actually a dome within a dome. It was quite claustrophobic as we neared the top - almost walking sideways in a stoop between the internal and external domes. Great views of the city from the top - it looked very much like a medieval town from a fantasy novel - eg Raymond Fiest or Fritz Leiber ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fafhrd_and_the_Gray_Mouser ). Once we made the top of the dome, we decided to climb the tower next door. We ditched Kate at this point - she did not want to do the tower. We did a lot of exercise on the whole tour - most of it by climbing the main attractions! Here’s a link to the dome and tower http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florence_Cathedral

By now, we were a little over going into museums and art galleries - but we both knew we would cop it if we did not make an effort to go and see the original statue of David - even though we had seen a copy of him out in the main square. We lined up outside the main gallery for about 45 minutes before we finally shuffled through the doors. Leading up to the main statue were about 7 statues Michelangelo
( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelangelo - take note this guys appears in a lot more history and our travels) had worked on through his life - the statues were incomplete - and seemed to be imprisoned in the marble - probably why they were called the prisoners!

The main statue was breath taking - I literally stopped in my tracks when I saw him! There were masses of people walking round him looking up at him with fevered eyes. We stayed in there for about half an hour just walking round him. We then moved into the main area of the museum, only to come back to David about 10 minutes later. Mark was that inspired, he bought a large poster of the statue.

Once we got out, we wondered round the town - totally over seeing anything else - although we did make it to the bridge in the centre of town that house’s lots of jewellery shops. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponte_Vecchio

We headed to the restaurant and meeting point at about 7pm. We were promised a great meal, followed by karaoke - which we were a little dubious about. As it turned out, we were right to have been - the meal was good - but then when we went into the next bar, we realised we had been caught in a tourist trap again! About 3 tourist busses of Contiki tools turned up - we wanted out ASAP. One good thing about the bar though, they sold table kegs - 5L of beer with it’s own tap. Very cool!

On the bus back to the camp, I got talked into - well maybe the 5L of beer helped - into busting out the Dingo Rap on the bus - it went down quite well!

The next brief will be about romantic Rome!

Ciao for now……