FLORENCE, ITALY

The trains in Italy were as nice as everywhere else in Europe and surprisingly right on time. I arrived in Florence around 1 p.m. and walked about 8 minutes down the street to the hotel I had reserved on my usual web site. This place was supposedly a 3.5 star place that wasn’t in the middle of everything, but seemed close enough on the maps and it was only €35 per night. The lobby was very professional looking, but right after I checked in I noticed the elevators were kind of trashed and the room was just okay. Once again, my “single” room contained only one small twin bed. This was actually another hotel aimed at business people and tour groups so I really wonder how these bigger places still get away with the small bed thing, but I guess it’s just the norm in Europe. One thing I am grateful is these same places usually charge much less for a single than a double where in the U.S. it’s often the exact same rate.

I threw my stuff in the room and hit the street. I quickly noticed that I was in a miniature Chinatown. It always puzzles me how and why the Chinese people seem to spread themselves out like they do. It seems that just about every town in the world with more than, say, 10,000 people in it has a few Chinese families that run a restaurant and often a grocery store. I am happy they do this because they usually have long hours, but I still find it weird that they don’t bunch up more than they do. I guess they realize if they are going to run small stores or restaurants or laundry places there is a low saturation point for these businesses and being architects or plumbers just doesn’t seem like their thing.

I had finally read up on Florence the night before and also on the train. It’s obviously one of the big tourist cities, but even my own reasons for going there were unclear. It’s a logical place to stop between Venice and Rome and it is in the heart of the famous Tuscany region, but other than that I wasn’t too sure why I was stopping there. It turns out it is famed for museums stuffed with classic art and also first-class shopping. I had already decided to take a stand on going to art museums just to say I’ve gone and I am definitely not doing any shopping so it was a curious place for me. I did, however, want to get the feel of Tuscany and its cuisine so I wasn’t unhappy to be there.

The main tourist sights are (once again) the cathedral and a few other churches and town squares. A major problem with a trip like this is lavish churches and town squares are in every large city and many small cities so they just blend together after a while. The squares in Brussels and Madrid stand out to me, but most others look a lot alike. I walked across town and first had a great lunch in a self-service restaurant that specializes in Tuscan cuisine. I just got there in time as they open from noon ‘til 3 for lunch and then 7 ‘til11 for dinner and I arrived about 2:30. This seems like an efficient way to run restaurants actually, but since I am often on a weird schedule sometimes it really messes with me.

After lunch I checked out the exterior of the baroque cathedral and then just did sort of a walking tour of the major sights on the way to the river and then a different route on the way back. Florence is definitely a pleasant looking city, but some people seem to consider it one of the most beautiful cities on Earth so I was actually disappointed. After a couple hours of this I wandered back to my hotel, passing a seemingly permanent swap meet that is set up in the middle of various streets in one large section of town. The usual sunglass and souvenir sellers were also sprinkled with many people selling bootleg CDs and DVDs.

When I got back to my hotel I looked back at my guidebook and realized that unless I wanted to go in some museums, I had already “seen the city”. I had to do some writing work and luckily there was a good Internet place near my hotel that let me hook up my laptop and wasn’t too expensive. I spent a couple hours there that evening and then got some takeout Turkish food from a place nearby to bring back to my room.

The first thing I wanted to do the next day, after breakfast of course, was find a particular bookstore I had read about called The Paperback Exchange. I still had a few guidebooks that I no longer needed and wanted to get a Greece book as well. I was hoping this place lived up to its name and it did. I was able to trade in my books (not for very much money, but I just like to keep them in circulation rather than throw them away) and I picked up a Let’s Go - Greece 2005 book and a Lonely Planet - Istanbul 2003 book, used, cheap. I really enjoy little tasks like locating bookstores and whatnot. It often takes you off the tourist trail and lets you get lost in a completely different way.

After that I decided to see the inside of the cathedral. It really is very impressive on the outside and it was free to enter so enter I did. I was very surprised that unlike most other cathedrals of this size, this one was almost completely empty on the inside. I don’t know if the parishioners stand or they wheel seats in and out, but the floor was bare except for a few trees of candles. I paid and lit one for my Uncle Don and was soon back outside.

Since I still had a big chunk of the day left I decided to try to go in one of the big museums there. It was only about 5 blocks away and since this was a winter Monday I thought I could probably just breeze straight in. This is one of the museums that required a reservation, usually at least a day in advance, but in the off-season this rarely matters. I arrived to find a huge crowd of school kids waiting in a line about 50 meters long. I knew instantly I wasn’t going to get in. This was the Monday 13 days before Easter and I slowly found out that many schools, especially American ones, take the week before Easter week off. This fact really influenced the size and makeup of the crowds I began seeing on that day.

The one place that really did interest me was a science museum near the river so I headed over there. That museum features telescopes and sundials and clocks and various other instruments used in the last 1,000 years of science. It was dry, but very interesting. I had to go around a couple large groups of bored Scandinavian kids on a field trip, but once I got ahead of them the place was nearly empty. The permanent displays were all very impressive and the helpful employees made sure that English speakers got a well-written guide that puts things in contexts. It was especially interesting that the printed material admitted that France and England, then later Germany, dominated most of science in that period and the Italians often just copied instruments designed up north. There was also a temporary display on the bottom floor that had examples showing the history and evolution of the bicycle. This was very enlightening and helped explain why, in France and Italy, bicycle racing is considered a real sport and why they get so pissed that an American is so dominant at the moment.

After another excellent cone of gelato I wanted to get my train ticket to Rome for the next day. You can buy tickets at the train station, but refreshingly, you can also buy them for the same price at a travel agency and usually save the headaches of lines and language barriers. I went to the American Express office in the historic center and learned a valuable lesson. Just because it’s an American Express office in Italy, doesn’t mean that it operates with anything approaching American efficiency. There was a long line for financial transactions, but luckily I could buy a train ticket with plastic and avoid that line. The problem was the person who was supposed to man the line I needed was MIA for about 15 minutes. The woman at the line next door said she would call the person I needed, but that didn’t seem to speed things up at all. I eventually got my ticket, but the whole thing took nearly an hour. I could have gone to the train station in far less time, but cest la vie.

I had to use the Internet more that evening so I had another dull night. I spent Sunday and Monday nights in Florence and walking around all day gets tiring so I basically skipped even really looking at the nightlife there. I actually got some cheap take out food from the Chinese place near my hotel after I finished my work and packed it in for the night.

Florence seems like a really nice place, but I think I was really starting to suffer from a dulling of the senses from seeing so much new in such a short time. I had plenty of energy while I was there, unlike when I was in Granada, for example, but seeing so many places day after day started to make me appreciate each one less than I otherwise would have. I already had a plane ticket from Rome to Athens purchased for 3 days later so I knew I would have to just keep my focus and see Rome in three days and then figure out a possible solution in Greece.

The hotel checkout was predictably smooth and I boarded the Rome-bound train at 10:00.