Tuesday, September 06, 2005

Florence, Italy - DAY ONE








We arrived in Florence at about 2:30pm, dropped our bags off in our mobile home-type room and prepped for the free walking tour we were getting from our Busabout guide. At 3:30pm the bunch of us all headed into town on the bus. We arrived in the city centre in 20 minutes and we were, well, not all that impressed. In fact, no one was and about half of the people that arrived there with us that day and were supposed to stay for three nights ended up grabbing the bus to Nice the next morning instead of bothering to stay.... We all walked around, had a look at the famous bridge (Couldn't tell you the name of it at this point) that has the many, many jewellery stores on it. It used to have many, many butcher shops however the butchers continuously threw the meat scraps over the edge of the bridge so eventually they changed it to a jewellery bridge. (Which was probably a REALLY good idea). We also saw the FAKE statue of David in the square, as well as some markets, the Duomo (Beautiful!), etc. After the short tour we all split up to have some free time before we all met up for dinner. Luke and I were hot (It was BOILING!) so we found an english paper (American, of course, but still better than nothing) and found a shady patio where we had a beer and I read the paper out loud to Luke. On the way to this shady patio we had noticed a jazz bar that opened at 6:00pm, so at 6:00pm we headed back to it for one drink before meeting everyone at 6:45pm. Luke and I walked into a beautiful place. We ordered a Lemoncello (A traditional drink in the South of Italy) which we sipped on until it was time to go.
Dinner was good. Four courses. The first course was bruchetta, second was 2 types of pasta, third was chicken for me and a crappy steak for Luke with a salad and fries, and fourth was yummy fruit gelato. We couldnt't eat it all (I don't think anyone could!) and we were full so we decided to head back to the campsite rather than stay and consume more food and alcohol.
On the bus we ran into some people from our campsite. When we hopped off the bus we all went to a wine store (I picked up 2 bottles of CHEAP red) and we went back and ended up hanging out with some Kiwi's drinking this wine, Luke drank Whisky and we all got a little obnoxious.
There is a tour company called Contiki (Don't know if you've heard of it) that was also at the campground and we could hear them partying so we kinda crashed their party and started our own Karaoke party. Fun. Eventually we all got kicked out of the outside bar area (Including Contiki) and sent back to our area of the campsite. Luke and another one of the boys we were with decided to pee on the Contiki bus, just for the fun of it. For some reason we all thought we were WAY better than Contiki that night. Security followed us and gave us some shit but I chatted with him and promised we'd be quiet... and then I hopped on his scooter and he gave me a zippy, fast ride around the campsite, which was really funny cause he was really serious and didn't smile in front of anyone except me once we took off. I think he was afraid to be a nice guy in front of everyone else. You know how boys are!
After that we all sat down again and continued the party but eventuallly, at about 3:00am we all broke it up and hit the sack.
Ok, now, don't get me wrong.... Florence has many beautiful things, but as a whole I really didn't find it all that impressive. I was told about the architecture and blah, blah, blah, but personally I found Venice to be MUCH more impressive.

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hi Guys; Peeing on Buses, Luke! Glad you are still having fun. Love Mom xo

9:39 AM  

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