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| 2009-06-24 19:46 |
| April 28, Day 4 - A Florence Type Thing |
| Public |
| Florence, Italy |
| creative |
| awww cute, basillica, da vinci, duomo, florence, food glorious food, italy, la giostra, marble, mom & dad's anniversary, palace, photosynth, pics, ponte vecchio, travel, uffizi gallery, walking |
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 And now you know where I got the adorable profile picture (Apologies for falling off on the updates, I just really suck at sitting down and getting it done. Please forgive me.) UP AND AT 'EM! I'm pretty sure including breakfast is just an excuse for them to jack up the rates a bit at these hotels, but it's so convenient, and tasty. So first thing in the morning (damn, that's what I get for not providing Dad with any feedback in the planning stage), we walk about 20 minutes, pretty much back to the train station, where we just arrived yesterday. This time, though, we're here to join a 3 hour walking tour. Bonus points, there were only two people on the tour who weren't with our family. Not so bonus: it' 3 freaking hours! Sure, there's plenty to see and learn here, but Erica and I have about the same attention as Parker. Oh look, a bicycle! squirrel! And having Parker around is the biggest distraction of all. So we see all these places whose names I never catch, and now every time I need to refer to one of them, I'll have to ask Mom & Dad which is which! We see the outside of this one church and our guide tells us about the place while I play with Parker. We pass through a bazaar, where there's a ton of leather. I was really tempted to get a jacket, but (fortunately for my wallet) nothing caught my eye. We got to the Duomo (aka Basillica di Santa Maria del Fiore) - this gigantic marble... palace? Maybe more like cathedral, right in the center of town. I mean the entire exterior is marble. It was gorgeous, and yet atrocius in its excess, and I mean that in a beautiful gold and marble way. The guide talked about it a great length.... while I played with Parker (look right). More walking (there is a lot of that on this trip) led us to the Palazzo degli Uffizi (home of the Uffizi Gallery, which we'll see later today), across the Ponte Vecchio over the Arno River, and ended our morning at the Piazza de Pitti, outside the Gallery Palatina. I played with Parker the whole time. The Ponte Vecchio (literally "old bridge") was lined on each side with small shops and offered a few good photo ops. Interesting historical tidbit: as the Germans bailed out in World War II, they destroyed all the bridges along the way... except this one. It's believed Hitler preserved it because he recognized its historical value (so he just had his army destroy every structure near the bridge). See? Hitler wasn't 100% evil. We puttered around a bit before our scheduled time to actually go through the Uffizi, which I have no real pictures of. I did, however, take a lot of pictures outside the Gallery, and was able to put together my first Photosynth, which you should totally check out. Think of it kinda like stitching together a panorama, only the individual photos are all from different positions and angles and you can move through them. Go look at it, I'll wait... Unfortunately, once inside the Gallery, most art focused on religious themes - usually Christian ones. And I can only admire so many paintings of Jesus, Mary, The Saints, and combinations thereof. There was one piece I was somewhat interested in, and that was an incomplete painting by Da Vinci. My inner Nerd (the part of me that likes taking things apart to see how they work) really got into seeing how the painting was "assembled" - layers of sketches, basic paint, more complex portions, and then some areas that were full of detail. Unfortunately all of the sculptures were gone or covered up for some reason, so all we saw were the paintings, and the architecture of the gallery itself. By the time we were finished, we were all pretty tired. This was definitely our most exhausting day yet, but there was still one last thing to be done. This was the night we needed to have a specal dinner (as if any other dinner in Italy isn't special) in honor of Mom and Dad's 40th anniversary. Woohoo!
On the way back to the hotel from the Uffizi, we spotted a "Michelin Rated" ristorante, La Giostra, and thought it looked promising. good. freaking. call! Dinner was fantastic. AGAIN! It felt like a good "proper" Italian meal. We ordered plenty of food, but that didn't stop them from giving us an extra appetizer sampler on the house (to accompany the trhee or four appetizers we did order). It was massive. We had buffalo mozzarela, sauteed things, fried things... So good, and yet this was just the warm up! Some of us had a hard time deciding what to order, but we seemed to have a great rapport with the (very attractive) waitress, so we just pulled the "I like such and such, what should I order" and put our faith in her. She sold me on the Ox. And it was good. There was much rejoicing. Yeah, Ox. Whoda thunk it? It was so good, in fact, that I can't remember at all what the rest of the family had. Gee, bummer. They staff treated us really well, and at the end, they brought out a bottle of Grappa and just left it at the table for us while they ran the bill. (Though it wasn't a huge risk since Dad & I were the only ones who could handle the stuff. If memory serves, it had a really sooth taste, but a strong rubbing alcohol smell.) After this dinner, it was straight back to the hotel and into our respective beds and food comas!
( Some other photos that day... )Edit: Now with spellcheck-y goodness!
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 OK, the highlight of the whole train ride? PARKER TIME! Can we say weee? (Oh yeah, I also practiced card tricks and technique. I'm gonna need a lot more practice...) This is among my favorite pictures. I get Parker, and Jason, and Parker is happy, and I'm looking good (naturally). It's a bit uncanny how similar Jason & I are in this one. Well, not too uncanny, I mean, he is my brother. Our hotel here in Florence is a building that's about 400 years old, it's the Hotel Monna Lisa. Guess what the theme is. There's a reading room with something like fifty Mona Lisas, all different variations. There's a cubist style (as in Picasso), and one where she's smoking something that might explain the smile, one where she's not quite... dressed. Erica got pictures of some of them. [Editorial note: as I'm lying in bed writing this, my iPod just had one of those really weird "shuffle" moments - it played Jesus Christ by Brand New, followed immediately by Get Behind Me Satan by The White Stripes. Odd. OK, I now return you to my regularly scheduled ranting and rambling.] We vegged at the hotel (Mom & Dad are in an AWESOME room!) for a little bit before heading on to one of the finest meals we've had yet. We all thought Venice was tasty, but dinner tonight at I Ghibellini really raised the bar. I had a pasta, I think it was called Tagliatelle Tartufati (don't hold me to that), it was like fettuccine, with mushrooms and a truffle oil sauce. It was astounding, at first I was disappointed that it wasn't my main course, because I doubted anything could compare! And that wasn't the only great thing we had: Kelli had an amazing porcini and artichoke pizza, Mom had a tuscan soup called ribollita (beans, spinach, bread, veggies... stuff), and the bruschetta pretty much shamed everything I'd ever had back home! It was another one of those meals where we just couldn't get over how good everything was, and it seems like a steal after seeing how much some things were in Venice. Of course, we had to have gelato after dinner, and then we all had to go back to the Monna Lisa and pass out in glorious food comas. God, I'm loving it here!
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