Saving Florence

April 13th, 2010

Today we got up a lot more reluctantly. We'd seen most of the city the day before so we were planning on doing museums today. We went to the l'Accademia Belle Arti where the original David is. The line was forever long and we heard the only thing to see in there was David so we decided we'd rather spend our money on the Galleria di Uffizi. It has more art that Val and Mamie wanted to see so we headed over there and took pictures of the David outside of that museum instead. This line was even longer than the last one so after some investigation I found that we would be waiting 2 hours in that line, but if we made a reservation for tomorrow it would cost 10.50 euro but we could go right in. So we decided time was money and we would pay the extra euro to go tomorrow. We thought we'd try to get in for the European Union student price so we went up to the window and spoke French accents and showed our French IDs but he didn't buy it. He wanted to see our passports, so we just said we would pay the full price. Too bad.

From there we went to get lunch. We shared a little pizza and a bottle of water and our waiter sang to us. He seriously spoke every language. I've decided I'm going to live there and work as a waitress. I could learn Italian and speak English, Spanish and French with all the tourists.

We wandered over to Santa Croce after lunch where we saw some musicians and got some pretty good gelato. We were all tired so we decided to head back to our room and take a nap before heading back to see the city at night. We slept for about 1.5 hours then we went to find a place to eat. The food is so good here. I could eat it forever. We then walked up all those stairs again to see Florence at night. It was beautiful. You could see the stars and all the city lights. All the big monuments were lit up and it was just a beautiful sight. We got our 5th gelato up there and ate it on the stairs before coming back to the hotel. But on our way back we were walking past a plazza and saw a trash can smoking. I pointed it out to the girls and we decided we should tell someone. Seconds after it burst into flames. A woman came to hand us a flier about her bar and Valeria said, "No thanks, but do you know someone we could tell about that?" The woman immediately ran to tell a group of cops one street over and they all came running. One ran to the nearest restaurant and got a waiter to bring out a bucket of water. There must have been 15 cops there.

And that is the story of how I saved Florence from burning to the ground!