Rod and Les took us on a short walking tour before letting us go for the night. We walked to the duomo and then split up to go to dinner. A group of us split and went to find a smaller restaurant. We ended up finding a small pizza restaurant where I had a vegetarian pizza with artichoke and mushroom on it. I also had a White Russian to drink with my meal that was pretty delicious as well.
After dinner we all walked to get gelato at a store Rod had pointed out earlier as his favorite. I got pistachio and hazelnut which was very good but extremely cold and cold to eat in the winter here. When we returned to the hostel, my room decided to do laundry all together since you could pay to use the washer and dryer. The six of us decided to do three loads together. We put all of our clothes in the two washers since they were both empty and went upstairs to wait for them to finish.
When we returned downstairs to put the clothes into the two dryers available we realized one was about halfway through a cycle. We thought it was a bit strange that someone was drying clothes without using a washer first but we just ignored it. We waited for the dryer to be finished when an Asian women and her daughter came in to wait for a washer. It was hard to explain why we were not able to move our washed clothes out of the washer into a dryer since one of the dryers was still going with a mystery persons clothes. As soon as the mystery dryer finished the women and girl were on top of us to get our clothes out. We felt bad opening someone's dryer and placing their things on the top of it but we didn't have much of a choice.
Opening up the dryer, I started pulling out the clothes while Kathleen and Hillary cleaned the lint trap. They looked at the trap wondering why it had white dry crusty stuff covering it. After putting the first armful on the dryer top, I looked down to see a pair of dirty underwear had fallen out onto the floor from the load of laundry. We immediately figured it out. Someone had put their clothes in the dryer thinking it was a washer and had put detergent in the lint trap. A girl walked into the room right as we finished pulling all of the warm dirty clothes out and cleaning the trap. She was very confused and didn't understand why someone would have dried her clothes for her. After explaining to her which were dryers and which were washers we felt bad but it was hard to not laugh later about the situation.
We finally got our clothes washed dried and sanitized our hands from touching the dirty laundry and then had to hang most of our newly washed clothes on our portable clothes lines across the room. The room looked like a jungle with bags exploded everywhere on the floor.
The next morning we met with a tour guide to see the city and hear about the Medici family who were the patrons of Michelangelo. We walked around and saw the famous bridge Ponte Vecchio as well as the palace of the family who were rivals of the Medici. The gardens were gorgeous with giant hills that killed to walk up after walking down to the lower parts. That night we all split to do our own things. A group of us were hoping to get to see The statue of David but found out the museum that housed David was closed that day sadly. We decided to climb the highest hill to over look the city and see the duomo. Hillary, Kathleen, Chen, Nick, and I all decided to go climb to the top of the duomo as our friends who went to Italy over the summer highly recommended.
The dome if the duomo is actually two layers and you climb in between the walls to the top. It was so crazy because as you rose in the walls the stairs started getting narrower and narrower which was terrifying. There were 463 stairs to the top and the last leg was almost vertical over the curve of the dome. We made it to the top and took lots of fun pictures before turning around to go down. Looking down the last leg of the stairs we had taken to come up was terrifying! You felt like you could fall forward at any moment. We had a lot of fun together before going to see the stores on the ground, and making our nightly gelato stop.
We had a lot of fun that night walking around and seeing the leather market. We met a man named Arman working in the leather market who had lived all over the world at one time or another. He had resided in Florence for twenty years but seemed like he had a lot of stories to tell and a great outlook on life. He told us of a really good and not extremely expensive restaurant down the street where we could get local food.
As we walked to the restaurant we realized it was closed for the night so we went to a place next with slightly higher prices but man it was worth it! I got my favorite meal of the trip which was a tortellini pasta filled with pears and cheese in a creamy white sauce of some kind. It was so good I think I may crave that pasta for a long time to come. We stayed and talked together a lot at dinner because it is not rushed in Italy. Meals are meant to be slow paced which is hard to do when you have so little time in a city but it can be nice when you do take time.
The next day we went and visited two small hill towns. San Gimignano was our first stop. We got off the bus and started up the hilly streets.
We all went to go find lunch, and since Kathleen, Hillary and I are the slowest sketchers we were last as always. Haha. We walked up the narrow streets getting lost in the little alleys until we found ourselves up so high we were out of the streets. We decided to return back down and on the way we found a really good diner to grab a piece of pizza in.
Our next stop on the road was Siena which is a small hill town known for its horse races in the street every year. The have a giant empty square in the center of the city which is known as the main piece of the race track. It was pretty neat to see all of the small stores along the street. All of them had lots of Italian cooking spices and beautiful scarves hung up in the doorways. We returned to Florence pretty late that night in the middle of a hail storm which was pretty terrifying to listen to while on the bus.
When we returned we all decided to pack our bags and hang out with a lot of the group that night before waking up early the next morning and leaving for Rome.
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