Sav: Our first order of business today was to grab an Italian coffee, and mosey on over to the Galleria dell’ Accademia to sneak a peek at the statue of David. Funny enough we’ve had incredible luck with lines in Florence, which continued when we arrived at the museum. There was a huge line for pre-booked tickets, and almost no line for unbooked, so after a group of people we breezed right on in. We pretty much bee-lined for David, and was he ever a sight.

Not kidding I have never felt particularly moved by art or statues. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but David totally blew me away. Standing seventeen feet tall in a well lit room made especially for him, you could tell he was leaps and bounds better than most other works. There’s a reason he is so famous, and it was completely apparent upon seeing him. The marble almost seemed like it would feel fleshy if I were to touch it, an odd thought but completely true. We sat and stared at him for over half an hour.

Meag: Savanna’s right, it was amazing. And so much more lifelike than all the other statues we’ve seen, no question.

There was a nice little surprise for us at the gallery too – an instrument display! The instruments date back to the 17th century when Grand Prince Ferdinando de Medici started collecting them for his court. There was a bunch of different instruments, but I was immediately drawn to the clarinets and pianos of course. The Lorraine Collection clarinets were a little newer, from the 19th century I believe, but still just as cool. The really exciting room was the piano room where they had a displays with harpsichords, some very early pianofortes and panels about the man who invented the pianoforte, Bartolomeo Cristofori. It was very tempting to reach out and play a few notes but I managed to control myself. I particularly liked the small crosscut display where you can play a single note and compare the internal mechanics of the two. While we were in here I kept thinking about how much my high school band teacher, Mr. Johnson, would love it.

Once we dragged ourselves away from the instrument display, David and a very informative video on painting altarpieces, we went to the Duomo and followed Paddy’s advice. Instead of waiting in the two-hour long line up, Paddy suggested that we go and pre-book our time to climb the dome. Good advice, Paddy! We booked our climb time 15 minutes in advance and skipped the entire line. I’m not sure why no one else was doing this because the line up was around the corner. Our luck continues! It was great, the first 15 minutes or so of our climb and view within the dome was completely alone. The dome is much higher than I thought and the view outside was beautiful. We could see the entire city and the Tuscan hills from up there. We have climbed a lot of stairs and hills on this trip for a view and it never gets old. I love being up high and having a different perspective on the city, trying to find all the places we’ve been and all the places we’re going. Nothing beats a blue sky, being slightly out of breath and taking in a new view.

We always like checking out the markets in town, so we went and perused the market with our eyes peeled for a nice leather belt for Savanna. Most of the stalls were full of leather goods, giving us lots to choose from. As expected, they were very pushy and didn’t like taking no for an answer. But Savanna stuck to her guns, argued, and got exactly what she wanted for half the price we found at the first stall. We wandered around a bit more, looking at bags and chuckling at the stall owners attempting to get us to buy something.

S: We trekked up to the Piazza Michelangelo to watch the sunset, which turned out to be gorgeous. The day was foggy so we thought it might not be wonderful but when we got there we found an entire piazza worth of people who obviously knew better than us. We squeezed our way into a seat on the giant staircase and listened to an acoustic guitar player as the sun went down over Florence. To top it off, occasionally a handful of bubbles would float past. It was absolutely perfect. And then a gaggle of 10 younger American girls sat right next to us, and that signalled the end of that! We lasted about 30 seconds listening to them and then decided immediately that we were hungry.

M: Not just hungry. Super hungry. On our way down the hill looking for dinner we found the source of the bubbles – a man halfway down was blowing tons and tons of bubbles. Everything in this town seems magical.

Since everyone eats late here, we were the only people at the restaurant. It was a cute little place in a courtyard down a side street. The solitude suited us just fine and we took full advantage of it to talk about everything we’ve done so far and what the next stages of our trip will look like. We couldn’t leave Florence without going back to Santa Trinita for gelato. Like yesterday, it was fawesome.

We wound our way home with gelato bellies to find an unfortunate surprise that we should have seen coming… remember yesterday when Savanna mentioned the mattresses wrapped in garbage bags? Do you see where I’m going with this? If you guessed bed bugs, you are right.

S: This morning I’d had a couple bites but chalked it up to mosquitos that we had seen floating about in the room since our window was open. Literally neither of us thought it was bed bugs. We both assumed they were preventing people from bringing them in with the bags. And even this morning it didn’t really cross my mind. Unfortunately not everything in travel is glamorous and fun so we had a solid panic, some upsetting conversation and snappiness and then started to deal with it.

M: Cristian, the strange hostel owner we mentioned yesterday, was with us the whole time we were cleaning, intermittently asking how he could help and saying we probably brought them with us. As much as I just wanted him to go away, he did provide a few weird laughs throughout the night because I’m so unsure about how to interact with him. At one point when we were checking the seams of our bags and talking about laundry, we had the following exchange:

Cristian (completely out of the blue, he had been silent for some time): “Don’t be afraid to do anything.”
Meag: “…About laundry or life?”
Cristian: “Anything. Don’t be afraid to talk to God.”
Us: “…”

Solid bed bug advice, thanks Cristian.

S: Meaghan thankfully had no bites so after hours of laundry, organization and meticulous seam checking we are hoping our stuff is bed bug free. We will be bagging our pyjamas and leaving this hostel first thing in the morning. Stay tuned for fun updates on this.

S&M