Day 24 – Wednesday December 29th 2010 (Florence, Italy)

Today we took off for the train station and I slept on the way to Florence while Lijah read. The train was super cramped and kinda annoying. Once we arrived at Florence we debated shortly about just staying in the station for the night to save money but quickly decided that finding a Hostel would be a better idea. We’re basically hostel finding experts so we found the cheapest Hostel in about 3 seconds and were on our way in 4. This one was unique because there were beautiful paintings covering all the walls and all the other walls throughout the whole building were covered in quotes and messages from other people. It was enlightening to read the wisdom that other travelers had written up on the wall. Our room was nice, we were roomies with a cool Asian dude that had been all over Europe and so I peppered him with questions about the places I will be visiting, I also accidently stole his bed but its ok cuz I gave it back without a fight. Later we left the must filled room and broke out into the bright sunshine of Florence like birds from a pie. Florence was incredible and we were so close to everything there was no need for metro or busses. We immediately decided to go out and walk the main streets without really knowing what Florence had to offer. An ancient man told us that we should go to this massive Durmo Basilica in the old part of the city and then a bridge and then a museum. We were surprised to find that there were a buncha famous works of art by Michelangelo in Florence, including David! We were also impressed by the level of history and traditional lush leatherworking in Florence. I think the best part of the night was taking pictures of these chain banisters completely covered in locks. On most of the locks were little hearts and names and we were told that people lock them to these chains in order to find love. So many people do it that they have to remove all the locks every three months. I thought it was beautiful. I absolutely loved the colorful shutters on all the bridge apartments and we were able to eat some pretty gruesome looking pizza from some street vendor. By the time it was getting dark we were ready to escape from the craziness. Over the course of the day we had seen tons of art and I had renewed my desire to draw! I even bought a leather sketch book and some fine art drawing graphite sticks from an amazing Italian art store called Lidels. We twirled into our hostel and sacked out fairly early in the evening.