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  Florence, Italy
Monday, December 25, 2006

We dropped the car at the airport to avoid the hassle of trying to drive on narrow, maze-like one-way streets downtown.  Good move.  Florence turns out to be hard enough to find your way around, even with a map. 
Our decent accommodation search turned up empty, so we made for the hostel across the river.  Going for the cheapest option, we get put in the 22-bunk room, and save a Euro each for every night! The room is set up with rows of bunks and lockers between.  We're issued sheets at check-in and our first task is to make our beds.  Wow- this is just like the army I never joined!
Florence is a lot like the other Italian places we've been.  Lots of cobblestones, lots of old buildings sprinkled liberally around the city.  This was the birthplace of the Renaissance, so of course, there are a whole lot of worthy sculptures and paintings about.  Michaelangelo's David is here, although we skip the original in a pricey museum and instead view the copy that's been put in the Piazza where David was once viewed freely.
 
Menu prices seem higher here, so we got to a local grocer's and bought fresh tomatoes, pasta, and some sauce.  We cooked 2 nights' worth of pasta and had plenty of uncooked noodles left over for Cierra to crunch on.  (Don't ask me why, but she likes to eat dry pasta.) Both nights, we end up cooking in the hostel's kitchen right next to Dan, from Brisbane, Australia.  We hit it off well enough with Dan that we've got a place to stay in April when we get back to Australia!
 
The second night, we really went all out and bought some local salami to put in with the tomatoes and cook up our own sauce.  Theresa, a Italian girl from Naples who was staying at our hostel, introduced herself and proceeded to coach Dan and I through a makeshift Italian cooking course.  Dan started out with an early lead because he knew to boil his vegetables with his ravioli, but lost out when he poured cold water over the whole mess after draining.  Theresa had serious reservations about my plan to use the grease from the salami to help cook down the tomatoes, but ended up declaring my dish the winner.
But enough about our cheapo culinary adventures! What about the sights, you ask? Right-O.  We went in a whole bunch of churches, and we can tell you for certain that once you've been in Italian cathedrals, you'll have a harder time being impressed by Spanish ones.  Where Spanish ones just feature grey stone on the interior, the Italians have spruced things up with gleaming marble.  One of the churches we toured had the tombs of the greatest that Florence had to offer... Michaelangelo, Galileo, and (not sure why) Napoleon. (Actually, my helpful brother has pointed out that we didn't see Napoleon's tomb, only his niece's, Charlotte Napoleon Bonaparte.  And here I thought Napoleon was compensating for more than his height.)  But, other than that, we really didn't get in many places here.  Prices were high enough that we contented ourselves with long walks around the city, checking out the architecture and drooling on the windows whenever we saw big heaps of gelato.
Something so small can really brighten your day when you're traveling on a really tight budget.  Today, walking the chilly streets of Florence, I looked down and saw a wrapped snack package of 6 cookies lying on the sidewalk.  Picking it up, I expected to find that it was empty or crushed, but found instead it was unopened and undamaged.  Awesome.  A free dessert! This is the first time we've picked up food off the street and eaten it on this trip.  Although I did go through a moment of consideration in Finland when I saw a half eaten Mc Cheeseburger sitting on its wrapper down there.  I ultimately remembered what McDonald's food tastes like fresh and didn't want to find out what it's like when its been refrozen. 
 
Since we had to be in Pisa for our flight to Malta on Thursday, we left Florence on Wednesday and covered most of the distance, getting off in Luca, where we spent the night.
 
Lucca is a quiet and quaint town, once extremely affluent as a banking center, now perhaps not thriving but still quite nice.  The Rennaisance-era walls have been preserved, keeping the old town shielded from long-dead barbarians, as well as the city traffic outside.  Inside, we strolled the streets contentedly, having secured a room in a beautiful bed and breakfast for a tiny bit more than we would have paid for a hostel.
 
Pizza is the name of the game here for budget travelers looking to get fed well.  Cierra and I were so hungry when we sat down that we didn't even care that the anchovies appeared to be made entirely from salt.
 
Lucca does have the distinction of being the coldest place so far on our journey, however.  With all of my winter clothes on, it was all I could do to brave the evening hours out of doors.  Thank goodness we would head to Malta soon, where the warming effect of the sea would temper the cold of winter.  And speaking of Malta, we got word today that a kind soul would be taking us in for our stay in Malta.  Receipt of this news causes Cierra and I to do a little happy dance in the middle of an Internet cafe (you have to worry about yourself when the Italians think you're crazy), and it puts a great big smile on both our faces for the rest of the day. 

Well, nearly the rest of the day.  Grandma Hemmerlein's funeral is happening this evening back in the States, and Cierra is understandably somber.  She decides that it's not right for her to be sightseeing or doing something inconsequential during this time, and she'd rather take a long walk alone, along the city wall that we'd walked part of before.  She's gone a long time, and when she returns, she says she's feeling better.

Getting up early in the morning, we barely caught the train to Pisa...

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