We're here!!!

Mary was completely out in the first 5 minutes on the train.

We had a long couple of days traveling from plane to plane to train to train, then we drug our luggage down uneven stone sidewalks. After about 20 minutes, we finally found our quaint little hotel entrance, and a man opened the door, and Mary said, "We're here!!!" She acted like he knew who we were. The man just stared at her, and there was a moment of silence, and I was thinking, Mary!! Say something else. Maybe a, "We're here to check in." or "Do you work at the hotel?" Anyways, after we got over the awkward moment, we couldn't stop laughing at Mary's first words to our hotel owner. He was one of the most serious people that I have ever met and he never cracked a smile, very nice, but doesn't laugh at any of our jokes or when one of us says "Hola!" or when we accidently walked past our hotel today saying, that man looks just like our hotel owner!

Anyways, yesterday we went to a nice dinner at Trattoria ZaZa. It was delicious, and we went to bed at about 8 because of exhaustion, but the baby playing outside kept us up until about 9:30. We expected to wake up early this morning because we'd gone to sleep early, but I was the first one up at 10 am this morning. Oops! So much for the early start for sightseeing!

My favorite part so far has been the Centrale Market. We went this morning and bought dried fruit, nuts, mozzarella cheese, wine, olive oil, bread and mushroom dip, and all at a good price for snacks, breakfast, and picnics.

The Duomo

After that, we were off to do some hard core sightseeing. As I was totally engrossed in finding the Accademia so that we could see Michelangelo's David statue, I got hit by a woman on a bike. I didn't even see her coming until her handle bars whammed into my arms and her tire ran over my foot. A big crowd of people kind of gasped and a man asked if I was okay. It was a little embarrassing because everyone was looking at us. I'm pretty sure the woman on the bike was on drugs because she gave a completely blank stare and didn't say a word to me. We walked away and I couldn't believe she didn't say sorry. Plus, we never found the Accademia.

Don't know if you can see the tire marks across my toes.

Then we went walking through all the other sights, including a cathedral where Mary and I had to put scarves on over our dresses to make them cover our knees to get into the church. Mary had to put two scarves on, one to cover her shoulders and one to cover her knees. The man at the entrance laughed at her.

Anyways, then we went walking down past the Uffizi museum, Piazza Signoria, and to the Ponte Vecchio bridge that was so cute. It is a bridge across the river with a bunch of shops on it. By that time we were so tired that we sat on the bridge for a while and then made the trek back to our hotel/apartment. We have a kitchen and living room in our apartment, so it's nice to keep drinks. As I sit here blogging, both Mary and Anne G are asleep. They were out in about 10 minutes.

This is for my grandmother, Dixie.
It's funny to see "Dixie" in Florence!

We're going to rest a while until our picnic tonight so that we can stay out past 8 pm! We want to be able to stay up for the sunset tonight.