Italy Blog: Florence

Florence 5/27-5/30

The only train tickets that I was able to buy ahead of time (while still in the states) was between Venezia (Venice) and Firenze (Florence.) When we arrived at the Venice train station we realized that I bought the wrong tickets. I had bought train tickets for another train station in Venice and not the one we were at. Ouch. I had no idea that cities had multiple train stations and I thought that Venice was small enough that it should only have 1 train station – boy was I wrong! The Tren Italia website certainly wasn’t very helpful either since it simply asked me what city I was departing from, not which train station I wanted to depart from. Ultimately we ended up sneaking onto a train (and risking a fine since there wasn’t enough time to buy an actual ticket) which would take us to our actual train station that I had tickets for. We had approximately 2 minutes between the time from when the train [that we snuck onto] got into the station we had tickets for and for us to high tail it onto the train. It was definitely a lot more stress than we needed at 9 in the morning.

Finally we made it to Florence and the weather forecast was for rain. This time our hotel was close enough to the train station that we were able to walk. By the time we got to the hotel the sky looked ominous and we were so tired that we didn’t want to do anything except eat lunch.

We had lunch at the restaurant next to our hotel and that was probably the best meal we had in Florence. Ming had a pasta dish with duck and I had a pasta dish with porcinis. We shared the most amazing steak: a 1 kilo (2.2 pounds) bisteca alla fiorentina. It is basically a huge porter house cooked medium rare (they cook all steak that way in Italy) and extra virgin olive oil is drizzled on top of it. We thoroughly enjoyed the steak and it helped to put is in a better frame of mind.

By the end of the meal it was raining steadily and we went back upstairs to grab our umbrella. After having gone to Hawaii and getting caught in the rain season (on our very first vacation together) we have learned to always bring an umbrella. I am glad that we brought it b/c it made all the difference when we were in Florence.

The rest of the day we meandered around for various site seeing and shopping. Florence is definitely a walking city. Everywhere you go is about 10 minutes by foot. Florence is like a real city, e.g. people live on the upper levels of buildings and commercial stores are at the bottom.

Towards the end of the trip, when our feet started aching and my back was begging for me to sit down and rest we decided to head up to the clock tower near the duomo (yup, Florence has a duomo too.) The clock tower is 414 steps and it doesn’t have an elevator. We thought that 414 steps was easy (considering we had already walked nearly 50 miles for the entire trip by that time.) We failed to realize that the steps were incredibly steep, there weren’t any hand rails and it was basically a very steep ascent up several meters. Finally, huffing and puffing later, we made it up to the clock tower and saw Florence from a bird’s eye view. The city was breath taking. I love the terra cotta roofs and it makes me want to get one for my house – just kidding Ming!

On the day of the wedding we were dressed to the 9s (it is a wedding after all) and took a taxi to the rental car company. We had to drive a rental car to the wedding since it was on a remote estate in the middle of the countryside. The wedding was great and Ming saw a lot of old acquaintances. We had a fabulous cocktail hour followed by a 5 course meal. The biggest bummer of the evening was that it was cold and I hadn’t brought a jacket (it had been in the high 80s the entire trip) because I didn’t think I’d need one. That night ended up being very chilly and heating lamps had to be brought out to keep the guests warm. I borrowed Ming’s jacket for the entire evening to stay warm. Dinner lasted until 11pm and that’s when we had to head back to return the rental car … that’s where the excitement began …

We got back to Florence ok and decided that it’d be best to return the rental car to the same location we picked it up at because they had a garage attendant who could call us a cab back to the hotel. Originally we were going to return the car to another location so we only had driving directions to that other location. The exciting part of this trip occurs now since it is a near nightmare trying to navigate the streets of Florence. Basically we had to deal with the crazy motorists (who create lanes on their own and don’t follow what’s marked on the roads) and we didn’t have any directions to where we were going. We drove around for about 40 minutes trying to find the car rental return and a gas station. Everything in Italy closes early and there wasn’t a single gas station with an attendant open at midnight. Finally we drove into a gas station that had a pay machine and had the lights on. We couldn’t use our credit card and had to pay in Euros to get the gas. Once we filled up we couldn’t figure out how to get our change back. Apparently the pay machine only knows how to take your money and not give any change back. Ahh! After struggling for a few minutes we decided to forgo our change and got back on the streets to try to find the car rental return. Around 1am we gave up (since that is when the gas station attendant would have left to go home) and we got back onto the freeway again to go to our original car return location.

We found our original car rental return location easily enough and dropped the car off. Now we had to find a cab to take us back to the hotel. It was past 1 in the morning and we were both sleepy and tired. The problem now was: how do we hail a cab when we were in some remote, industrial area? We didn’t know the phone number of the cab company and they don’t have any yellow pages for us to find the phone number. We were about a 40 minute walk away from our hotel so we started to make our way to the hotel, hoping to find a free cab on the way. We’re dressed to the 9s, in a strange city, and it’s late at night. Do we feel safe? Nope. I clenched Ming’s arm the entire way because I had this ever present fear that someone would come up to us and mug us. Eventually we made it to the hotel, the entire time never seeing a free cab. We then proceeded to drop into bed and snooze soundly since we were leaving the next day.

We were so ready to go home at this point!