Italy day 3: Florence

We started today with the best of intentions. We woke up at the crack of 10am, and went next door to the cafe for breakfast. After that strenuous activity, we came back to grab a few things from the apartment and fell asleep until 1pm. While Lisa was sleeping, the camera elves came into the apartment and took a few pictures of the bedroom and courtyard. Also after she woke up, she was extremely patient and posed for this picture in our charming little kitchen, even though the obnoxious camera elf took about 50 pictures to get it right, and accidentally deleted the only good one of the batch, and therefore had to take them again.









Our little courtyard!











Entrance to our apartment









Bedroom - surprisingly large







There is a beautiful painted ceiling in the bedroom, which we love to look at.







Cute kitchen containing cute girl


After that, we went out for some sight-seeing in the rain. After successfully buying our train tickets to Rome with no English signs, we bought 24-hour passes for the sight-seeing city bus, only to be stymied by the bus attendant who is convinced that 24 hours means "until we stop at 7pm tonight." So we wandered around on foot, revisiting some of our favorite neighborhoods in Oltrarno on the south side of the river. Oltrarno is a much less touristy neighborhood, where many people live and work, and very little English is spoken. We did manage to find an electrical adaptor that works better than the one we bought in the U.S. for 1/8 the price, and Lisa attempted to have a conversation with a shopkeeper about the price of pine nuts in Italy compared to U.S. Between the fact that he was measuring them in grams compared to Lisa in ounces, and Euros to dollars, and throw on the fact that neither one spoke a word of the other's language, they actually did pretty well, and the shopkeeper was very happy to give us a free pine nut sample.










After that, we toured the entry to Bobolo Gardens, and saw some very impressive statues of Hercules. We joined the tourist throngs again at Ponto Vecchio, and made our way up to the famous Duomo, which Lisa thought was quite gaudy.








A pair of rowers passing underneath the bridges of Florence. This was taken by apprentice photographer Lisa Barnum from Ponto Vecchio. She had to take this photo under extreme pressure from the camera elf standing behind her yelling "take it now, take it now, before they get to the shadow! Check your settings! Check your ISO! Take it now!"

















Lisa spotted the shadow of the crucifix through the glass windows of the Duomo, and took this picture. Click the picture to see a larger size.




They are in the midst of a major cleanup operation from acid rain and pollution, and you can see their progress as they move along the wall. It's amazing to see the difference. Lisa had an "american coffee", which is considered the equivalent of decaf coffee around here. As it started getting dark and cold, we decided to have an early night and headed back to our apartment by 8:30, in time to watch a movie and get to bed with the very real possibility of leaving home before 10am tomorrow morning. After the movie, we had a very italian-feeling dinner in our kitchen consisting of leftover steak, fontina cheese with pear and apple slices on crackers, a bottle of Prosecco which Lisa polished off single-handedly, and a nugat chocolate bar (which Jesse took care of single-handedly).











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