Day 7

This was the bullet train day! We met up with Nicola in the lobby of the hotel and walked as a group over to the train station (just a few blocks). There we boarded the bullet train to Florence. Despite one odd stop in the middle of our journey, it was pretty fast, and it was WAY cleaner than the night train. We did however have a little run in with some pickpockets. Two ladies from our group were caught in the traffic jam trying to get on the train and had some people try to reach in their purses. Nothing stolen.

A mini bus (since our group is now down to the much better size of 11) was waiting for us when we arrived in Florence. The name "Florence" has its roots in the name "flora" or flower. Apparently the area now taken up by the city of Florence was a huge field of flowers when the ancients headed up this way to settle.

The ride to our Hotel took about 5 minutes. After dropping our bags and having a brief rest we headed out in search of lunch. Our walk to lunch took us through the St. Lawrence market. Lunch itself offered some new insight into Florence. When we sat at our table we were offered bread. This leads to three things. First, Nicola said that an Italian would never serve bread with the pasta dish. "That's a carb with another carb," he said. Second, the bread has no salt in it which leads to it also having little to no taste. Nicola explained that some centuries ago this region was at odds with the region of Italy where they received their salt. Since salt was hard to come by the people of Florence started making bread without it... and never stopped. Kristin and I found that it was rather tasty to clean your plate with at the end of the meal. Third, Nicola says that dipping bread into oil is not traditionally Italian (like at Macaroni Grill). He explained that an Italian may choose to put olive oil on bread and eat it, but he would never expect a dish with oil in it to dip his bread in. Who knew?

Next we met our local guide Analeisa. Our first stop with Ms. Ana was to see Michelangelo's David. Our guide today was prepared! From the moment we met her we started playing a game. This was just the type of tour we needed. Something immediately fun to go with all the ancient dates and old churches. The statue of David was more remarkable than I had anticipated. The way Michelangelo was able to show the muscles and veins under the skin was stunning to me. After our brief visit with David we walked out into an alley where Analeisa had the girls pose Rob and myself as close to David's pose as possible (all as passers by looked on). I won!

The walking tour wound down by the Duomo (the large cathedral in Florence... you can't miss it. It's pretty big. 30 stories to the top of the dome). I'll write more on that later. It also took us through some of the older medieval streets and past some buildings and museums we may want to go back to and explore more thoroughly in our free time. Our tour ended by Santa Croce (Holy Cross Church). After all that walking, we needed some gelato. Nicola knew just the place!