Florence

So for the sake of space I am making this it's own entry, but I should note that I was in Florence for less than 12 hours, and most of this entry will be about travel from Paris.

Ryanair flies uot of Paris-Beauvais airport, which is a little over an hour from the edge of Paris on a good day. Thursday was not a good day. It took us two hours to get from the bus station to the airport, meaning that we got there 3 minutes before they closed check-in for our flight. Now, even though they were closing check in, our flight was delayed. So we got to wait in Beauvais, an airport that probably has 20 chairs. We sat on the floor. Our flight had the worst turbulence I've ever been in, but luckily it was only for a few minutes.

We got into Pisa around 1:30, then had another hour by bus into Florence. We ended up taking a taxi to our hostel and got there just before 3am. We knew would get in late, so we made sure to choose a hostel that had 24hour reception. We started ringing the buzzer to be let in: no answer.

Clearly at this point we were sort of freaking out, since it was 3am and we were in a country where we don't speak the language and we had no idea what to do. We started to call the hostel numbers we had in our confirmation email. The first two went to automated messages in Italian, but finally the third number worked. We spoke to a guy who told us he was at the other location for the hostel, but he would be there soon to check us in.

A little after three we got another call from the hostel guy, telling us that the police had been called to his other location, and he needed to stay and translate. Great. Long story short, Danielle and I ended up sitting for about an hour and a half on the streets of Florence and didn't get into our hostel until 4am. This was especially awesome, since our check out was at 10am. He told us we could stay a little later if we needed, so we stayed until about 11, and he gave us a 9euro discount on the room.

We needed to get to Cinque Terre by 5:30 to check into our new place. We walked past the Duomo and I took some pictures. I would have liked to have gone in, but the lines were insane and we were in a hurry. I got to see the Ghiberti doors reproduction, which was cool. I find myself having constant flashbacks to high school Humanities in Europe. My teachers would be proud.

Clearly I will need to go back to Florence at some point in my life.

Anyway, Italy is hard. We missed some trains, bought too many tickets, and generally were very confused on Friday, but we did make it to Cinque Terre eventually and it was amazing.

PS. I didn't eat in Florence, but I got McDonalds in the train station. Forgive me.



(the first two pictures are of our hostel, it was kind of cool)