Un Aqua, Per Piacere?

Firenze was fun.

And by fun,
I mean we only spent about 4 hours there
and despite my best intentions
I was rather monstrously and nauseatingly hung over.

It's only an hour train ride, I'll go back some other time.

- Or, it's only an hour if you don't get over excited and get off at Frirenze Campo Marta instead of Firenze SMN (Santo Maria Novella). Not that we did that. That would be dumb.
...
Fortunately, you can just just back on the next train. If you sit in one of the back cars, it doesn't even appear that they check your ticket ever.


We didn't have a plan. Or a map.
We got off the train, started walking, and found a restaurant to refresh ourselves at. It was a decent place called Rstorante Pizzeria Lorenzo di Medici with menus complete with english subtitles, although the bathroom was occupied for some time by a woman who appeared to have been taking a bath in the bidet.
I had ravioli with truffle sauce.
And a 3 euro coke light in an uber chic can (everyone in Europe really is thinner, even the fucking diet coke cans),
And a slightly desicated bowl of tiramisu which had clearly been sitting out for a while, but was still pretty good.
Jasmine tried the Cantuccini e Vin Santos (biscotti you dip in Vin Santos), which didn't even want to think about ordering but tried anyway because felt that I needed, for the good of the blog, to be able to make some sort of report on it. I liked it, I think. Not too sweet, it would be nice to enjoy it after a good meal - and who doesn't like dunking their cookies in their drink? No one who can rightly be called a Shunk, that's for sure.

Then we browsed the open air market, where I bought postcards, and stumbled into a plazza with a strange statue a church I don't know the name of, and a group of our friends who had come earlier in the day.
This is when I decided to go home when I heard that some people were leaving on the 7:20 train.

What ensued was a brisk walk through tour of Florence, where I saw the Duomo (stunning, green) and a collection of streets and plazzas I remembered vaguely from my last trip to the city (I then realized that I had been to the very place I was standing 10 years before, which freaked me out - it's still strange to think of having done something or been somewhere a decade ago which I remember with more that that childish haze, although I did feel like the city was alot smaller than I remembered.) We ended up at the Ponte Vecchio at about sunset, which was beautiful, because all of the little jewelry shops were starting to turn the lights in their display cases on as the peachy sun sank lower, leaving pockets of shadow and window of glittering light. (the bathroom at the train station was cool too - we had to pay 70 cents, but it was all golden top light reflecting off of pink marble, and each of the open stalls was lit from above by a neon blue glow... totally worth it.)

The train ride back took a good hour and a half, since we stopped at every town in between, but the country side was beautiful, and the company was pleasant, and I was finally starting to get over my hangover.
Even the walk back through the city and up the hill was not too bad (as long as we weren't walking too fast my head wasn't throbbing), and Nellie and I decided to leave our bags by the side of the road and go up on the aqueduct to look at the stars before bed.

Unfortunately, as Nellie was explaining to me that we had to be quiet because f the people in the house nearby woke up they would call the police, a car pulls up and stops and a man gets our and says something booming in Italian. After a good two minutes of hiding made it clear that he was not going to leave, we got down and walked over in a confusion of "Me despiace" and "no capito, io non so".
Ah, but t seems my Italian lessons are paying off, because it only took a minute or two for me to understand that he had seen our unattended bags and been afraid that they were bombs, and once I caught on and answered that we were in fact "tutto qui", the only ones here, we were both so relieved to have been understood that he shook my hand and wished us a buon cera.

Not so bad, on the whole.
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