Wanna buy a hand bag?

The next Italian stop, Florence. Florence (or Firenze, I don't know why we Americanize the names of Foreign countries so much... I can pronounce Firenze) is a beautiful city, we were lucky because with our hostel we got a free walking tour of the South side of the river. We got to see the Duomo, a huge dome which was built without the use of scaffolding with a dome within a dome. After the tour we wandered the north side, the Tuscany area, and got lost. At least we thought we were lost because it took us a long time to find our way out, and the view we were hoping for never really came. We did however get to climb through some bushes to get a glimpse of Florence from a hill top. Good times. One the second full day of our visit, we made the trip to Pisa. Guess what? we saw the tower of Pisa. It was pretty cool, it definitely looked like it was about to fall the entire time. We wanted to go up but it was ridiculously expensive. At one point I decided that i needed to have a piece of Pisa Pizza in Pisa, I did and it was delicious. Andrew and Jack each had a piece of my piece, so I guess that's a piece of a piece of Pisa Pizza in Pisa. (say that five times fast) . We also heard that Florence was known for its big and delicious steaks... I wish we could afford that. Speaking of buying things, the markets were crazy, tons of people all over the place, and they were all selling the EXACT SAME THING!! Your options were; purses, sunglasses or watches, then five feet later, purses, sunglasseses or watches. It was quite funny, because we didn't understand how the people selling would watch us say no to one guy selling watches then ask us right afterwards. My answer was usually "I have a watch thanks" and their quick reply was "why not two?". We escaped without buying anything.

On the third day, we wanted to do a bike tour, so we could get the nice views, see all the vineyards and go up into the mountains. Problem was, at least for me, that they were at least 70 euros for the tours, little steep for me. Luckily we found one where you could do a self guided tour for only the price of the bike, and they give you all the routes you can take with good places to stop for food. We did that and it was a good choice, the total kilometres was about 67 km. Jacks bike was the only one where the computer worked. We were definitely sore after that, but we got some great views and some good exercise. Unfortunately when we got back we found out that all the art galleries and museums that we wanted to go to were closed on Monday, and we had already booked our hostel for Rome. We hadn't even seen Michelangelo's David yet. With some skillful rearranging we worked it so that on our way to Nice, we can stop in Florence, do everything we missed without adding any extra time to our trip. Swish.

We went out one night with a bunch of people from the hostel on one of the nights. It was a pretty good time, our hostel was full of english speaking people so we had no troubles communicating, and they had no troubles explaining drinking games at the bar. We played a darts drinking game, and in case anyone was wondering... the Milton boys dominated. But seriously, it was fun and since it was early in our visit to Florence we made some friends for the next couple of days there too. Some of which I don't think we ever got their name.
So there's my Florence entry, but its not the last.