Wednesday I had the entire day to myself to do whatever I wanted. It was a decently warm day but it was pretty cloudy too, ahwell, I wasn’t really expecting there to be much sun at this time of year. Firenze is a different place when you’re on your own, I definitely kind of liked it better being there on my own and not being attached to a schedule or other people. I began my walk, over to the Duomo, across the piazza, and down the winding streets on the other side. I first came across one of the main piazzas where the merry-go-round was and had flashbacks of DHS guys running over and pretending to ride it, as well as, the group of us trying to use the old school public telephones to try and call our parents to tell them we had arrived in there safe and sound. I stopped in there to take a few photos, and then continued on my way. Eventually I arrived at the Piazza della Signoria where the tall clock tower is along with the copies of famous statues like David and other famous ones depicting stories of Roman gods/heroes, another very familiar place full of memories, although some memories not so pleasant…on one of my trips there we had gotten lost and got to the group meeting spot like 15 minutes late and chewed out by one of our teachers…oops. From there I followed down the side street with all the statues of famous philosophers and writers like Dante and Petraca who I had studied in some of my Italian history classes during 2nd year uni. After taking so many Italian and art history classes being back in Florence had even more beauty and significance to me, it was beautiful.
Beyond that little side road of all the philosophers is the river, this area of the river is probably one of my favourite places in the world. I reached the river and turned to the right to see my old friend, the Ponte Vecchio (in English ‘Old Bridge’) the famous Firenze bridge; colourful, lined with little jewelry shops, and crowded as always. But more important to me was the bridge beyond that. Walking down the pathway along the river towards the bridges, I felt like I was coming back to…maybe not home, but some place very familiar and comforting. That place was so full of good memories from both my previous trips there and I was just filled with this complete feeling of happiness. I walked down that old familiar cobblestone pathway along the river till I came to my bridge. I guess I should actually call it Our bridge, it was me and my 3 best friends from high school’s favourite place in Firenze. We shared some great moments there during my first trip to Firenze (which was also my first trip to Europe), it was almost sad returning there without them. I sat there on the bridge for a little while then continued on my way across it to explore more of other side of the river. I know we had gone onto that side of the river during our last tour but only to see the one big museum thing at Piazza Pitti and not much else.
After wandering down some of the main streets on the far side of the river, some familiar, some new, I stopped for some lunch at a little trattoria. There was only an Asian family and a couple people at the bar in there so it was pretty quiet. I ordered some pasta, spaghetti Bolognese, which was pretty good and then, continued on my wander. Of course I came across Piazza Pitti, it’s hard to miss, it’s a pretty big piazza that olds one of the big art museums in Firenze, we did a tour of it last time and it lasted like a hundred hours so I figured I probably didn’t want to do that again, it was one of those museums that you could only exit after you had gone through the whole museum which was very long and multiple stories. It was a pretty cool building from the outside so I took a moment to look over it again but then continued on my walk, I was walking down a little side street off the piazza and funny enough I ran into one of the American girls from the night before. She was off to class but said we should hang out later if I had the time, I said sure, she had given me her fb info the night before and whatnot. Small city though eh, you’d think the chances of me seeing one of those 3 American girls again would be pretty slim, but there you have it.
I continued on my walk, aimlessly wandering around, going down random side streets here and there and I some how ended up at the one of the main university campuses. I had passed a couple of the other smaller campuses during my wander but they had been smaller and were blended pretty well into the city, this however was a big park area that led to a couple of massive campus buildings, one of being the main arts faculty building, the façade was under construction, of course. There really isn’t much past the university on that side of Firenze so I turned myself around and started wandering back towards the centre of the city, I stopped for some delicious pizza on the way. They really do make pizza the best in Italy, I don’t know why north America hasn’t figured it out yet. The real secret is the dough, most places use focaccia bread as the base of the pizza –best bread in the entire world– and the toppings are always so fresh, plus Italian cheese is amazing.
I wandered back to the river and this time walked across Ponte Vecchio and down the street beyond it back towards the city centre. I walked only 50ft down the street before I came across another very familiar site, the Queen Victoria restaurant. It had been one of the spots me and my besties had stopped at quite a few times on our trip there. The paninis there had been really good, but even better than those was the gelato, so of course I stopped there to get some gelato. It was delicious, I had eaten that much gelato in Rome so I was definitely going to be eating as much of it Firenze as possible, that is where gelato is originally from after all.
I wandered further into the city, passing the old market place where I had bought a very European scarf on my first trip there, I stopped for a few minutes to wander through it again but this time I just looked at the pretty scarves, jackets, purses, and funny little souvenir items. This trip isn’t a touristy trip, it’s more of a “me” trip and so I’m spending as little money as possible on trivial things like shopping/souvenirs. Material things mean less to me these days, I’m learning to remove my attachment to material things and live for the experiences, and food; good food is definitely an okay thing to spend my money on in Europe. Aha. I eventually found myself back at the Duomo, I considered going up the Duomo tower where you can see an amazing view of the city but it was still pretty cloudy and I had already been walking for hours so going up a few hundred stairs didn’t seem that appealing. Instead I headed over to the train station to buy my ticket to Bologna for the following day. Yeah, my trip was planned pretty last minute but in Italy you can do that, especially at this time of year since it’s definitely not peak tourist season.
After that I just headed back to the hostel to rest my feet, I also still needed to book a hostel and whatnot for Bologna and figure out where I was going after Bologna, I was thinking about doing a little trip to Verona before heading to Milan to catch my train to Germany, which I also hadn’t booked tickets for at that point. You may be thinking I’m ridiculous for leaving all these things so last minute, well I wouldn’t have left the Bologna hostel so late except for the fact that I hadn’t been planning on staying in a hostel, I had made an account on CouchSurfing (CS) before leaving on my big trip and I had found someone who said they would most likely be able to host me in Bologna, unfortunately the night I arrived in Firenze they had sent me a msg saying they actually wouldn’t be able to host me so, I sent out an emergency CS msg but I hadn’t gotten any appealing offers by the time I had gotten back to the hostel on my second day in Firenze and decided it was just safer to book a hostel, unfortunately since it was so last minute there was really one 1 or 2 options for hostels, the cheapest one being some place called the tourist centre of Bologna or something like that, it didn’t really have much of a description but it was the cheapest so I booked it but only for 1 night because it was still kinda expensive.
I just chilled around the hostel after that, it was starting to rain again and it was getting colder since the sun had gone down, eventually the Aussies and everyone else started showing up again at the hostel, quite a few people had checked out that morning so we had some new people in the hostel, didn’t really meet any of them though besides a new Asian guy who was quite friendly and spoke pretty good English, all the other Asians seemed to kind of keep to themselves, not sure if they spoke much English or not. There were also 2 new Bangladesh guys who showed up later in the afternoon but soon disappeared and only reappeared later that night high as hell as kites and then disappeared into the living room area.
For some reason it was a quiet night in the hostel, no one really seemed to be around or doing anything, so it was just Nat, Mike, and I chilling around in the kitchen. We talked for along time, made dinner, drank some wine, and jammed to more random Aussie and North American music, at some point I remembered that I had a deck of cards with me so I pulled those out and we played cards for a long time. Eventually we all got kind of bored of cards, plus we were all starting to get pretty tipsy so concentrating was becoming more difficult, so we wandered out onto one of the balconies outside of the room Nat was staying in. It had turned into a clear night and you could actually see some stars which was so nice. While we were standing out there we could hear voices coming from the floor above, which was another hostel, and of course the voices were Aussie, you seriously run into them Everywhere in Europe. We stayed out there for a little while, Mike partially wanted to go out there so he could smoke although we weren’t really supposed to use the balcony for that. Ahwell. After that we all just crashed which was probably a good thing since I had to check out at 10am the next morning.
No comments:
Post a Comment