Sept 5 - Florence is Hot!

We’ve had a great day transitioning to Florence. Here’s what we did today:

• Took the train from Rome to Florence, got into Florence at 11am. It was over 95 degrees here today – hot, hot, hot!
• Found our hotel (about a 4 block walk from train station)
• Lunch at an outdoor café followed by gelato of the day
• Rambled through San Lorenzo street market and nearby shops
• Visited the Piazza del Duomo - religious center of Florence includes the Baptistery, cathedral (aka Duomo), and the Duomo museum (the picture to the right is of the Duomo cathedral)
  
• Back to the hotel for a non-siesta - we decided we need to stay up to force ourselves to fall asleep later tonight at a reasonable hour
• Dinner at an outdoor café down the street from our hotel followed by gelato

Misadventures of the day:

• Communicating with the man who helped us get our luggage on the train - long-story…
• At lunch today we did not get anything we ordered, we got something else entirely – so we just ate it. Why not?

One thing we learned today is that when you try to enter the church and you are not appropriately dressed, they make you wear a blue paper poncho. We had read about this, but had never seen it (at the Vatican we saw one woman wearing a scarf for a long skirt).

Favorites of the day:

• Learning to say “ciao-ciao” – because one “ciao” is just not enough.
• First view of the buildings in the Piazza del Duomo - the facades of these building are unbelievable – really we can’t believe they are real even though we are standing in front of them.
• Viewing the mosaics that cover the interior of the Baptistery dome – insanely beautiful (see picture to the right).
• When the pipe organ started playing while we were in Duomo Cathedral - it was so moving.
• Standing inches away from Michelangelo’s Pieta - uh-maze-ing. This piece has a compelling story too (see picture to the right).
• Talking to the couple from New Zealand who had the table next to us at dinner.

Best fact of the day: When they built the cathedral they had so much faith that even though they didn’t know how to build the dome, they built it with a hole in the roof with the faith that eventually someone would come along who could build the dome. Isn’t that the coolest story?

Ciao-ciao

:) Kristin