Firenze and Pisa

We left Rome at about 1:30 or so on Sunday, after all the churchies went to St. Peter's and I slept in gloriously late and hung out in the train station. That morning me, Mandie, Danielle and Alex had a beer at 10am because we had nothing to do. The guy working at the place thought we were hilarious and he ID'd us. The coach ride to Florence wasn't bad, although it got progressively colder. The hotel was MUCH better than Rome, but it smelled worse. At least we had a real shower. The first night we went out and had a great dinner, wine, and partied at the hotel.

The next morning we went to see Brunelleschi's Duomo, which Danielle and I felt very cultured knowing the history of from Beth Plummer's class. The paintings on the inside of the dome were insanely awesome and dirty and terrifying. We climbed up to the very top and got a panoramic view of Florence, and we could see the Medici Palace! There were a ton of steps and it was painful, but worth it.

After that, we had lunch and hopped on the train to Pisa. We ran into Taylor, Lacey and Zac at the station which was cool! Of course, the leaning tower is all the way across the entire freaking city, so it pretty much took longer to walk across Pisa than it took to ride the train there. However, it was so fun to see it! We took the compulsory cheesy "I'm holding up the tower" photos, got gelato, and got on the train to go back to Florence. That night after dinner we walked to Italy 2's hotel, which was about thirty thousand times nicer than ours, and hung out with everyone there as a last 'hurrah'. I was sad, it was my last time hanging out with Katie :( except at Heathrow of course. We walked back to the hotel after we all got kicked out, and just went to bed.

The next day we hit up the museums, we saw some Giottos and Ghibertis, and then - THE DAVID. Nothing, nothing, nothing could have prepared me to see that. It is unreal. I had always imagined it as being maybe slightly larger than life-size, but it is HUGE. About 20 ft tall. I stared at it for about twenty minutes and took illegal photos over Chris's shoulder. Unbelievable.

That night we met up with Collin Graw, who was studying with LTU in Florence. He took us to an American-ish bar in which we had giant burgers, a beer tower, and fries. It was delicious and hilarious to be in such an American place in the middle of Italy. After four days of nothing but pizza, pasta and gelato, it was a welcome variation.

Florence was great, and the next day it was off to our last hurrah - Venezia!