Florence

This is part 3 of the multipart vacation post.  It all starts with Rome.

So after Rome, we headed on a train for Florence for more fun and excitement.  If Rome was my favorite place to go to as a tourist in Italy, then Florence would be where I would choose to live.  It is much less touristy than Rome but still a bunch of stuff to do.  In the center of town is Il Duomo, which is a huge church.  It is quite the sight.  On the outside edge of the city is Pizzale Michaelango which has a fake David and the best view of the city.

The big draw in Florence to see the David.  It costs a few euros to get into the museum but it certainly is an impressive statue.  Its enourmous and the detailing is pretty incredible for a solid piece of marble and such a huge statue.  Also certainly worth the price of admission.

We ended Florence with what one of my more expensive learning experiences.  Some of the members of my group wanted to rent scooters and drive outside the city into Tuscany.  My spider senses were tingling the entire time and every bone in my body thought this was a bad idea.  For one of the first times in my life I caved to peer pressure and rented a scooter with them.  Needless to say, my gut was right as we basically tipped right over with 6 people on 3 scooters.  I left most of the skin of my left knee in Florence and scored a pretty fun jammed shoulder that is just now starting to feel better.  We made it all of about 10 yards before my vespa and the vespa in front of my started to fall towards the same part of curb.  The Italian lady to rented us the Vespas was upset and starting speaking Italian so fast, my head started to spin.  After paying the damages, our scooter adventure ended about 10 minutes after it began with prices at about 8 euro a yard traveled.  Lessons learned.  Certainly did make Florence memorable though.

Another great thing about Florence is the food.  The pizza and paninis were my main courses and the gelato is absolutely delightful.  All sorts of flavors and it is really quite tasty.  One of my other favorite parts of Florence is haggling the street vendors.  You can talk the price down on pretty much everyone and the illegal street vendors (who run from the cops at night during what we called Cops and Vendors, although the Cops don't try too hard to catch them) will pretty much sell you what they have at 85% less than the price they want to see you their stuff for.  I enjoyed seeing how low I can get them to go even if I never had an intention of buying.

That pretty much wrapped up Italy less the short trip to Pisa to end our first week.