Florence & Pisa!!!

Alright...I'm still like, 2 weeks behind on my posting....ugh...

So on October 4th, Binoy and I headed to the Questura (police station) to get our permit of stay papers approved and finalized. We arrived around 8am, and left around 11am if I remember correctly. It was a pretty funny experience, even though the entire process was irritating. They had to get copies of our fingerprints onto the police database, so they would scan your each fingerprint separately onto the computer. If the scanning was of a good quality, there is a computer icon that turns yellow or green. If it is of a bad quality, it remains red. Apparently...my fingers didn't like being scanned because the policeman had to scan each of them ten times. On my left hand, my ring and pinkie wouldn't scan at all...he tried about thirty times with an abundance of swears (thank god Vale taught those to me!), and even threatened to cut my fingers off. I thought that it was so funny that I was crying.

We then left for Florence! There were four of us traveling together: Binoy, Analise, and Anthony. The hostel that we had booked was pretty sweet, we had our own room, where Binoy and Anthony shared the Full and Analise and I each took a twin. We dropped our things off, and headed to the Uffizi Museum to buy tickets for tomorrow. (There are ridiculously long lines to buy tickets to visit museums day of... like 2 hours wait...) And than we headed to the San Marco Plaza, which was breathtaking. We simply sat there and stared into the city of Florence. We probably spent 3 hours sitting around and just taking it in.

We walked around Florence a lot, saw a soccer game, and headed to apperativo (of course). We were just so hungry... I don't think I really tasted the food. But we found some live entertainment at a plaza near our hostel while walking on our way back. There were performers that would take turns performing: singers, guitarists, and flutists took the stage, singing/playing American songs. This one couple sang the Beatles, and the flutist actually played a song from the Little Mermaid!

We headed in early since we were planning to go to the Accademia early in the morning to beat lines. The main attraction there was the David, and it was gorgeous! We marveled at it for a good hour. The rest of the works were not so impressive, but David was worth it.

We then headed to the Uffizi, and saw about 50 rooms full of artwork. It was all really nice, but again, I can't really remember what I did and didn't see at this museum. There were some famous ones I do remember/recognize, like "The Birth of Venus," by Botticelli. It's the famous painting of a naked woman in a shell. There were lots of paintings centered around Chirst and Madonna as well.

At this point Anthony and I were supposed to head home, but we somehow got convinced by Binoy and Analise to go to Pisa with them, which was also well worth it (it's an hour train ride from Florence). It's not worth going to Pisa alone because there's nothing to do there but to see the tower, it's only worth going in passing. So of course we took pictures of ourselves holding up the tower, and pictures of about 40 strangers all doing the same pose. The train ride back was about three hours, and we played various games the entire time. One of which was Contact! (Which of course makes me miss Wildwood, the car ride down, and ultimate in general.) We got back to Milan around 12am. It was a long trip, but all in all I'm glad we ended up going to Pisa as well.