florence

hey hey

i will be on my way home in a week. woah! but for now, i am in italy and italy is awesome! it's kind of funny that lisa and i went to milan first and were kind of disillusioned with how great it was going to be in this country, but venice and then florence made us love this place.

when i left off we were in venice about to go for an afternoon boat ride. well, we did that, and it was nice, and once we got on the boat lisa had a nice little nap. the boat was pertty busy so it was lucky to get a seat, but we cruised through the venice lagoon to another island that is mostly city called burano. it is the "lacemaker's island"... apparently it is famous for lace. another of the islands, murano, is famous for glass, and throughout venice there are beautiful glass things and jewellery, some of which are pretty tacky because they're so huge and colourful.

we spent 3 or 4 hours on the boats and burano before heading to a grocery store to pick up some limoncello, a liquor that is made with lemons and is about 30%. we got 2 bottles, although since we are now lightweights one would have been enough. we grabbed a quick dinner and enjoyed the bottle of limoncello (we mixed with sprite, i dunno if this is what people do or not) and then we went out to a nightclub in venice at around midnight. we met an american sailor there who didnt seem too impressed with venice and maintained that it was the only place to go there. good thing we found it!

we woke up at 11 the next day hungover and unprepared to carry our backpacks to florence. somehow we got ourselves on the vaporetto and onto the train, and found our hostel in florence easily. then we crashed for a nap until it was dark. ohh yeah.

florence is beautiful, everywhere. we went for a walk that night and made our way through the medieval streets until we came to the main piazza that is lit up and filled with monderful renaissance statues, like (a replica of) michangelo's david (which was moved inside).

we went to bed early and got up at 7:30 to go to the uffizi gallery. we found out too late that you can reserve tickets, so we waited in line with the other foolish tourists until after 11 before we finally got in. inside it was pretty nice, although i am getting a little tired of paintings of all of the same religious scenes. you can only look at so many similar interpretations of baby jesus on mary's lap with a bunch of people standing around before it all looks the same (to me anyways).

we grabbed a quick lunch after the gallery and then went to the leonardo museum, which was one of the coolest so far because we got to TOUCH things! some people got together and built a bunch of the machines from leonardo da vinci's notebooks, so they were all in a big room in this museum. flying machines, bicycle (350 years before they existed), armoured tank, hydraulic saw, odometer, and many more war machines and useful things. it was pretty awesome!

once we were finished there we went back to our hotel because we were tired and our feet hurt. we tried going out at night to wander but we only got far enough to grab dinner.

ahh i'm running out of time again!

okay, yesterday we woke up late and visited 2 churches in the afternoon. we were going to go to a renissance garden but it was 9 euros so we didnt. instead we sat on a patio in a square and had a few beers before climbing a giant hill and watching the sun go down over florence as the lights of the night came on. it was pretty spectacular.

today we are going to rome!

bye bye!

simon