Florence, Italy

We arrived in Florence in the early afternoon, made the long trek to our hostel, and were actually quite surprised at how nice the accommodations were! No bunk beds, wifi everywhere, a kitchen, and a very nice front desk woman makes for a great start to the week! We immediately set down our things and set off to explore the city. Luckily, the most important "to-do" on our list was also the closest to our hostel--the leather market! We spent about an hour roaming the streets looking at the millions of purses, wallets, jackets, etc, and we were in complete heaven! From there we saw the Duomo, Repubblica, Ponte Vecchio, Pitti Palace, etc. We literally conquered the city, by foot, in about 4 hours. We ended our walk at my favourite panini place from my last visit to Florence, called Gustapanino, where we had a delicious caprese panini for dinner! From there we decided to venture over to the "bar street" to check it out for the night ahead. Upon arriving back at the hostel, we knew that the next day we wouldn't be able to find enough to do, so we tried getting onto an amazing tour of Tuscany for the next day, but the office was closed. So, the front desk lady told us to show up at the tour desk 45 minutes before the tour was to take place, and we would likely be able to get on. So with this in our minds, we dressed up and headed to a go-to Irish pub for a little night out. We happened to meet some fellow travellers from Australia who had some amazing advice for us for Greece, so our small night out turned into a rather late night, arriving home at 3:30am.

9/11

Duomo

Market

3 parades in 1 day!

PANINI'S!!!

Ponte Vecchio

Even after such a late night, we knew the day would drag on if we were left to occupy ourselves in Florence, so we pushed through the tiredness and woke up at 7:30am to try and get to this tour desk by 8am. We walked down the street, into the office, waited for the director, only to be told at 8:45am that we missed the tour. BUMMER. We both were so so excited for it! We asked him if there was any other way to get out and see some of Tuscany, and he recommended we take a bus to the ancient walled town of San Gimignano, so off we went to the bus stop! 3 hours later we arrived in this quaint, gorgeous town. We walked around, took pictures of the city and the amazing views of Tuscany, had a delicious lunch and world famous ice cream, came across a medieval fair, and after 2 hours we were bored shitless with nothing left to see. We had checked the bus timetable earlier and it said the soonest bus home was 3pm, it was 2pm. We sat around, people watched, and at 2:45 headed to the bus stop only to realize the schedule was wrong. The bus had just come at 2:10, and the next one wasn't until 5:40. This was heartbreaking news to us as you can imagine. Luckily, there were 2 guys from Isreal who happened to be on our bus on the way there, who were also stranded, so we decided to share a taxi back to the neighbour city and take the train back to Florence. We called a cab, 1 hour later it arrived. He said it would cost 25Euro, but at this point we would pay anything, so we hopped in and were on our way. Once we reached the neighbouring town, we were about 1km away from the train station when all of a sudden the taxi cab just died. No idea why, but it stopped working. So, the taxi driver refused any payment as he pointed us in the direction of the station. We made it, and 20 minutes later a bus arrived and we were finally outta there. We were glad we got to get out and see another city, but man was it a pain getting there and back! Once we were back in Florence, we made a little pit stop at the leather market to buy the purses we had planned on purchasing, plus a few extras. I ended up buying a pretty turquoise ring, a leather satchel to use for the rest of this trip, and a big leather bag to send home with Chris when I met him in Greece--all for just 65euros! Jaimie bought a bigger satchel, a wallet, and a bracelet. Clearly, this made our day a bit better! When we got back that night, we had planned on going to this buffet restaurant that the front desk lady raved to us about. So, we made our way to the restaurant expecting to find a huge spread of all sorts of delicious pastas and meats. Nope. Shoulda known that wasn't in the cards for our lucky streak that day. It was a little bar with a card table and disposable plates…sketchy! However, we were so excited to try different pastas, and we were so hungry, and it was only 7euros, so we sucked it up and went on in. For just 7Euros, we had a 500mL beer, and 3 plates of food. The food was delicious, ranging from mussels to pasta to eggplant to raviolis to traditional Florentine fair. Absolutely delicious, it would have been worth 20euro! Extremely full and satisfied, we returned to the hostel to pack our things and call it an early night, as we had an early train to Cinque Terre to catch the next morning!

Tuscany

Random!