Florence and the (penny smashing) Machine

So we made it to Florence!  When we got to our apartment we were greeted by the mother of the lady that managed the apartment because it turns out she was out of town, which was interesting because her mom didn't speak English, at all.  So she gave us a tour of the apartment by means of pointing and gesturing, we had a short conversation with her daughter on the phone, and then we were left to our own devices, not even really knowing where the closest grocery store was and exhausted from our very odd train experience.  

I will just say we were thankful for the peanut butter and nutella I stuffed in my bag from Zagreb when we first arrived in Florence.  When we did venture out one of the first things we did was find a place to eat.  Florence is definitely not lacking on little restaurants and cafes and we found one not far from our house in a little courtyard area of a building that turned out to be super yummy!  We were excited that Italy had pepperoni pizza (or hot salami... close enough) as Croatia was big on ham on pizza but not so much pepperoni.  

After that we ventured a little further and found that we lived super close to what turned out to be my two favorite things in Florence:  Pitti Palace (which is like 5 places in one but more about it later) and the Ponte Vecchio, or Old Bridge.  

They were literally a 3 minute walk from our apartment.  It was perfect.  My love affair with the bridge started the first time we crossed it.  I had seen pictures and heard about it from my lovely friend Bonnie as one of her favorite places in Florence and was so excited to see it and walk across the bridge myself!  Living so close we crossed it many, many times while in Florence, and got to see it many different ways.  

We saw it crowded with people in the middle of the day, at night with all the shops closed up like old trunks with elaborate locks and metal decorations on the outside, at sunset with beautiful reflections on the water, once we even saw it with an almost naked man running across it wearing nothing by red underwear and a scarf (for some reason followed by another guy with a video camera, we're still looking for the youtube video), and I have to say my favorite way, we saw it with street musicians playing on it in the evening accompanied by a yummy gelato cone from one of the many Florence gelato shops.

Group of locks along the bridge

 There was a tradition for couples to lock locks on the bridge near a statue, but the city of Florence has tried to put a stop to it and imposed a fine for doing so.  As a result, people find anywhere they can on the bridge and lock their locks there so all over in random places you can see groups of locks attached together.
We crossed the bridge almost everyday and I have to say I have way too many pictures of it because, even though I had probably taken that same picture before, I was usually compelled to stop and photograph it because it's just so damn photogenic :)

here are some of those pics   

                                      
Another great place in Florence is the Piazza Signoria, just steps away from the Uffizi Gallery, a great place to people watch and home to a collection of outdoor statues, including an awesome bronze statue of "Perseus with the Head of Medusa" by Cellini and a replica of Michelangelo's David.

              

Not far from the Piazza Signoria is the Piazza Republica, which has a huge archway and a charming carousel, and is the place to go for a market filled with leather goods and souvenirs from Florence.  Later on in our trip we ended up getting some leather bracelets from one of the vendor stands on the Piazza Republica (we shopped around and if you're ever in the market for leather bracelets, definitely go to the stands in Piazza Republica, they gave us a great deal! ).

   

And it was also a place where we saw this great string trio play a couple 

times, they were awesome!

Now, you can't really mention Florence without talking about the icon of the city, the Duomo.  

Between the train station and the Piazza Signoria is the Basilica di Santa Maria del Fiore and the famous brick covered Duomo.  It's truly an awesome sight to see, huge and imposing in the center of Florence and incredibly detailed with the green and white facade, complete with many statues and intricately carved windows and designs.  Just in front of it is the Battistero di San Giovanni with its famous Golden doors with relief sculptures on them that are also quite impressive themselves and rarely without tourists posing for pictures in front of them. The inside of the dome itself is covered in Fresco paintings that are pretty striking but I have to say I was taken with the candle trees in the center of the church, which were absolutely beautiful.  

The inside of the Duomo

        

 After visiting some of the main sights, we decided to just go explore the city, do a little window shopping, pick out what restaurants we'd like to come back and try, and look for spots we knew we could come back to and just sit, have a glass of wine, eat some prosciutto and cheese and bread, and just relax and take in the beauty of the city. We had several of those spots by the end of our time here.  Here are some random pics from around the city:

I love my moka pot!

It became an addiction

Two things we couldn't get enough of in Florence - coffee (well me at least Erin isn't really a coffee fan) and gelato.  Our apartment had this Moka pot that I figured out how to use by watching a youtube video, and became pretty much my favorite thing each morning.  I'm definitely going to have to get one of those babies when I get back home!






And the gelato in Florence was amazing!  We got a recommendation from our friend Megan to go to Gelateria Del Niro near the Piazza del Signoria and after trying several gelato places in the city we agree that it was our favorite!  Thanks Megan!

The statue on the left is of Galileo Galilei

We also had to pick out which museums we'd want to visit while we were here, because one thing Florence has is an abundance of museums.  We ended up choosing to get the "Friends of the Uffizi card" which gave us access to the big museums like the Uffizi te Bargello and the Accedemia as well as Pitti Palace, some of the Medici Villas, and several other places and it ended up being a great deal.  I think it was worth it just for the entry to Pitti Palace/Boboli Gardens it gave us as we ended up going there time after time.  

Great views from the cafe at the Uffizi

One of the first museums we went to was the Uffizi Gallery, which has some pretty famous pieces like Botticelli's 'Venus' as well has tons of other paintings and sculptures.  However, the ceilings were actually one of my favorite things at the Uffizi Gallery, and we usually ended up with a sore neck while being there from looking upward to much!

I'm actually surprised I didn't run into more people.  But really I loved looking at those painted ceilings (Florence in general has some pretty amazing ceilings especially in the Pitti Palace Museums!)  and we noticed something pretty awesome when we were checking out the ceilings on the top floor in the second corridor, each section of ceiling had a theme and a name.
The names were not in English but the language was close enough that we could usually figure it out especially when looking at the paintings on that particular ceiling.  So we spent some time deciphering what each ceiling was, and I remember there was a Mathematics ceiling, a Philosophy ceiling, as well as ceilings for Painting, Justice and Architecture just to name a few.
All the ceilings had a central figure and other things around it and out of all the sections, only 1 didn't have a person at the center.
Now this ceiling was on the opposite corridor from the "themed and named" ceilings but guess what the only non-human center of a ceiling had? That's right.  An owl.  I'm glad they share an appreciation for owls, they are pretty great!

So kinda random:  I found a penny smashing machine in Florence! (Well actually a 2 cent euro smasher) 

 I love these and was so excited to find one here! woooo!

walking through the park to get to the market

The lady that managed the apartment we stayed in gave us a list of places to go and things to do that she recommended and on that list was the Tuesday Market by the river.  We had to walk a ways (about 4 bridges from the Old Bridge from our house) but it was actually pretty cool when we got there.  I got to see a beautiful park that we walked through to get to the market and the market itself was a trip.

The bustling Tuesday Market

The vendors all have trucks that they park along this street by the river and you can find pretty much anything there, from kitchen utensils to clothes to flowers and produce!  It seemed like we walked for miles going through that market, and it was fun to see all the different stuff for sale there (not to mention some of the characters selling those things!)

Here's a picture from when we were walking back home from across the river.  All those vans are the vendors and the market just goes on and on!

This is also where I bought my new owl.  He's pretty cute and his name is Jacapo.  And you might be seeing more of him.  But more on that later.

I'll leave you with a few pictures of some of my favorite Florence yummyness, drinks and desserts!

The Midnight Train to Florence...... (Woo ooh!)

Our first train ride experience!  Traveling from Zagreb to Florence was Erin and my first trip on a train, aside from the little tourist rides in Northern New Mexico and the Grand Canyon Area.  Our trip had three different trains (basically we had to change trains twice) and was an overnight trip.  Now let me tell you, train travel is very different than plane travel.  At the airport you are security checked and checked again and your boarding pass and passport have to be pretty much glued to your hand.  There are gate numbers and seat numbers on your ticket,

and there's boarding, and waiting.  At the train station (especially when you can't exactly read the signs) it's a little different.  No security checks, you just walk right through and even right on to the train without so much as a "bok" from someone working on the train.  Luckily Tomy helped us find the platform we needed (as it was not clearly marked on the tickets... apparently you need to check the arrival board for that kind of stuff) and when our train arrived we were well... fairly certain it was the right one, so we got on, found what we assumed would be an acceptable compartment for us to be in (again we are still kind of boggled by the lack of seat numbers issue) and our train adventure began.  

We passed the time by playing some cards, and I had a completely awesome gin streak and basically dominated go fish.  BAM.

Now let me go back and say that when we bought our tickets to Florence we bought them at the train station, choosing one of the two options the "information" lady gave us, who didn't speak a lot of English.  Now we knew the time we had to leave and the time and place we would arrive, but the in between was a little unclear.  There were city names of the places we had to change, the second of which was Venice, and the first of which was Villach West.  Now when we were on the train the border control came through and stamped passports and from that we could tell we had gone into Slovenia,  so we figured Villach must be in Slovenia!  But somehow when we got off the train for our first change all the signs were in 

German (or at least something that looked like German).   We were a little confused.  We got even more confused when we realized that we were the only ones who got off the train and that the station was empty.  Literally.  We were the only two people in sight.  Not even a person working there.  And did I mention it was about 2 am?  It felt like the twilight zone.  So we made our way to the "waiting room" aka the only room that was unlocked and had a light on.  Now with almost 3 hours to kill we decided to play some Texas holdem with I may say some very outrageous bets considering we had nothing to bet with and just made up whatever we wanted (I'm pretty sure we owe each other quite a lot of money and extravagant items) and laugh at our weird situation of being in a practically abandoned train station at 3am in... well we didn't even know what country we were in.  

Here's a video of our confusion.

Eventually our train did come (after some time spent in a little glass room outside on the platform spent playing 20 questions, of which Erin kept picking "meatball sub" as we had recently watched the F.R.I.E.N.D.S. episode where Joey and Phoebe play).  When we got on we were yet again boggled by the seating situation, as we had actual seat numbers this time, but our seats where taken by two people completely passed out across them.  Finally, Erin found some room in a compartment with just one sleeping person (a very nice guy, with an awesome accent, who I learned was from London when he woke up for 30 seconds as we shuffled our stuff around) and tried not to be too creepy as we came in and got our bags settled and tried to get a little bit of sleep.  When we looked it up later we found out that we had been in Austria, which means that we got to go through some pretty amazing mountains on the way from there to Venice.  Luckily, the mountains came at just about the same time as the sunrise and were an absolutely breathtaking sight to see.  Unluckily I was seeing them in a half asleep travel fatigue state and failed to find the camera and take a picture to put up here.  So you'll just have to trust me.

Our train change in Venice was much more normal, and pretty soon we were on our final train ride and arriving in Florence.  Once there we made our way to our apartment (which btw has awesome seahorse handles on the door and is about a 2.5 minute walk from Pitti Palace and Ponte Vecchio) and stated our Florentine adventure!