today we decided that we should face the long line into the cathedral. the inside was beautiful, like most of the cathedrals in europe. after the cathedral we went to the local market where they sell pashmina scarves and leather bags. here are our final pictures in florence.
today we went to the top of the hill in florence and got an amazing view of the entire city. the cathedral makes the rest of the city look miniature. erfon went and saw the david statue, which he loved. besides that we spent the rest of our time wandering around and enjoying the town. here are a few pictures for your enjoyment.
after our whirlwind day in rome we headed to florence for a few days of relaxing and exploring the city. We got into florence mid morning. we couldn’t check into our hostel and sleep yet so we decided to walk around the city instead. i really liked florence. Its small enough to walk around, but big enough to have lots to see. my favorite thing in florence was their cathedral, which is huge! it really is one of the biggest churches i think i’ve ever seen. it was so tall that if you looked at the top of it you couldn’t see the ground and it almost looked like it was moving. we decided not to go into it today, but to save that for another day. we spent a few hours exploring, but then deiced to go back to our hostel so that we could get a little sleep. after being up for over 36 hours we were very tired. after we both slept for a bit and showered we decided to head down to the little chinese restaurant below our hostel, which was a bad idea. it was here that we discovered the sitting fee that they charge in italy. of course they don’t tell you they are going to charge you and although its on the menu its in about 8pt font, so good luck seeing it. after our experience in greece we were not happy to once again get charged without knowing. 
anyways here are some pictures from our first day in florence…
after spending a few days in sorrento we headed to rome for a day. rome was defiantly an experience we will not soon forget. we took an early train from sorrento up to rome and we weren’t planning on staying at all, but we met this guy on couchsurfing.com named alessandro who single handedly changed our plans and we started our adventure in rome.
alessandro is a tour guide and said he would love to give us a tour of the city. so we decided to see if we could find a place to stay that night and see the city a little bit. alessandro came and picked us up from the train station and took up to this hostel that some of his friend were staying at. unfortunately the hostel we went to only had one room available, but it was $85, so we declined. but alessandro’s friends were great and let us keep our bags in their room till we figured out what we were going to do. next we jumped into alessandro’s car and away we went. we “saw” rome in about 2.5 hours. alessandro is one of those crazy italian drivers, so although i was sure we were going to die, it was fun to see a bit of the city. we just got a quick taste of rome, which is to bad because we both really liked what we saw. also alessandro had a really thick italian accent and he talked really fast, so although he was trying to tell us about rome we really had no idea what he was saying.
after our tour we met up with alessandro’s friends and went out for some really good italian pasta, probably the best we had on the entire trip. we also happened to be in rome the day before one of the major church holidays, so the next day pretty much all the tourist places would be closed and the pope was giving mass at vatican city so it would be packed. thus, we decided that to hangout with alessandro and his friends and then catch the first train to florence. we went outside of the city a bit to the beach, we had no idea rome was anywhere near a beach. we had a great time hanging out.
we spend the wee hours of the morning sitting in front of the train station waiting for it to open. we caught the 7:00am train to florence and had the best 2 hour nap that a person could have on a train.
sorry for the long delay in posts. life has been very busy sense we got back, but we will try to finish posting pictures and stories before the year is done.
on our way to croatia we had a brief stop in bari, italy. this was our first experience with the italians long afternoon break, where they close everything and its impossible to find food or water. from everything we had heard about bari it sounded like an ugly little port town, but after walking around and looking for food for hours we decided that it had its good features as well. there was this part of the city with lots of narrow alleys that is what i pictured when i thought of italy. here are a few pictures from bari. enjoy!
