Firenze

21/9/11 The morning we woke up in beautiful Florence we took our time getting ready for the day. It was so nice just to stroll around looking for breakfast but not feeling rushed. Our hostel is amazingly old and right across from Pitti Palace so it's a really short walk until you hit the Ponte Vecchio. It's also great that we have our own little room! On our adventure to find shampoo and face wash we actually ran into one of Ashley's Cal Poly friends that is doing the architecture program here! It was pretty awesome, and Kristina invited us to her apartment for tea later that night! We managed to find a market and I got some shampoo and Ashley just had to guess on the face wash, unless she wanted to spend 17 euro on the Cetaphil we found haha. We got some waters and yogurt too, haha I'm obsessed with European yogurt now. We next decided to head to Santa Croce Church. It was funny because we both knew we wanted to go their from reading the night before but couldn't remember why! As soon as we went in I recognized it from our last trip! We got to see Michelangelo, Galileo, Dante and Machiavelli's tombs! Although Dante's body is actually in the place he died. Franciscans saved Galileo's body and finally he was given a Christian burial way after he died. It's amazing how they were able to hide his family and his body from the Church for so long! Monks are awesome. And Michelangelo wanted to be buried where he died, Rome! But someone convinced others that since he had family here it was meant to be. Santa Croce was also amazing because in the museum you can see the restored works they were able to save after the horrendous flood of 1966. We saw a lot of other tombs too that I won't list but know from my limited knowledge of Italian history. There was some works by Giotto and Brunelleschi too! After we went back to our room and decided to head out for lunch and get a good view of the city to see il Duomo and the buildings of Palazzo Vecchio. On our way walking we found a really good gelato shop and started heading up the hills. The problem was that I had no idea how to get to Palazzo Michelangelo and we found this spot that might be it on the map and went that way. Haha it was this abandoned fortress and there were signs about how people had died. Needless to say we were not going to go up there, and it was so quiet and very eerie so we started walking back down towards the center of the city. But the road that followed didn't have a sidewalk so that was an adventure as well. It was very pretty because it was next to the old wall but terrifying with cars flying by! We walked down and found a tower that you could go up that had just recently opened called Niccolo Tower I think. It was gorgeous. Ashley got her view and we realized we were so close to the Palazzo we were looking for! Haha but after climbing all those steps and walking up hills we decided to save that for the next day. We went back to our hostel for a bit and then set out for Kristina's apartment. They live pretty close to the duomo and it was very pretty at night. We got to her apartment and she served us some tea and biscotti, we met her roommate Jessica too. They have such an adorable apartment that was decorated when they got it and then it had their figure drawings. After finding out that we hadn't had dinner Kristina made us some pasta with fresh eggplant and it was delicious! Then we all went out for a walk and some gelato we ate on one of the bridges over the Arno. It was a great night and we were pretty excited to hear how they liked studying abroad so far, it's safe to say they loved it. :)