Day 9 - Siena and Florence
Its a 6am wake up call again. Luckily, I didn't have much coffee the day before and managed to get some decent sleep. But making me wake up at 6am will still turn me into a mean and nasty person. Atleast theres electricity and breakfast is semi ready by the time we get there. And again, just like yesterday, we "acquired" some lunch from breakfast, whilst watching Good Old trying to figure out how to use the coffee machine again.
Each bundle is a sandwich...By the time we get back to our rooms to gather the rest of our belongings and doing a final check, the lovely porters in the hotel has picked up all our suitcases and had them loaded into the tour bus. We're off to Florence!
So we all jump into the bus by 7:30am, and by 8am, Moishii had passed out. The coffee I had that morning had basically kept me wide awake, which was a good thing. For those who ever travel by road around southern Italy, you will be greeted with fields and fields of Sunflower, as far as the eye can see. Since it was in Summer, the sunflowers were in full bloom, presenting us with a field of golden yellow. I have never seen anything as beautiful before. It puts the cement highways surrounded with desolated bush to shame. I whip our my camera and attempt to grab a few photos. Unfortunately, when you're going 110km/hr on a highway, its a bit hard to get any decent photos. After about 50, I finally managed to get ONE decent photo. I wish I could've asked the bus driver to stop and let us take photos. *SigH*
The rare photo that was semi in focusBy about 10am, we pull into the first of many AutoGrills we will stop at. The first thing that hits me when I get off the bus is the stench. It smells like poo. Ewwwww. I quickly race into the AutoGrill and hit the toilets before I meet up with Moishii at the bar. It was an espresso each thanks!
I've had espressos before in Australia, and although I love my coffee and drink it almost twice a day, I can't enjoy espressos in Australia. I tend to get a Macchiato, which is an espresso with a dollop of milk. I find this tends to take away alot of the bitterness I taste in an espresso. The espresso we had at the AutoGrill however, was DIVINE. There is NO bitterness whatsoever. It doesn't burn your mouth and you can easily toss the whole thing back. The coffee is smooth and aromatic, the perfect coffee to hit the spot when you get dragged out of bed at 6am.
After knocking back the coffee, I roamed around the AutoGrill to see what they've got. And really, the service station/truck stops we have in Australia are disgraceful. Not only do they have quality fresh made sandwiches, but you can easily purchase fresh fruit, cheeses, salami and other sandwich meats along with a loaf of fresh panini to make your own picnic. The food is HEALTHY and wholesome. No greasey deep fried chicken and hot dogs that have been sitting there for days. Look at what they have!!!
We jump back into the bus for the next leg of the journey to Siena before we go to Florence. This is when we spotted this:
And hence Clawfeet was born. I'm sure Matt is loving that picture right now. And with Clawfeet is her husband Golden girls man, which we subsequently renamed as Colgate, because he always looks like he's in a Colgate toothpaste ad of some sort. It was really bad trying not to have a laughing fit when they're sitting RIGHT next to us!
We finally get to Siena, and the minute we got off the bus, we knew this was going to be a special place. Unlike Rome, which is a huge city with huge monuments that make you feel insignificant, Siena had the quaint little Italian village feel. With the narrow streets and cobblestoned walkways, and the laundry hanging out of the windows, you really feel like you're on an Italian movie set. Especially when the friendly locals hang out of their window to wave to you!!
We had about 2hours to explore Siena at our own leisure, so the first stop will be the Duomo for some photos. Unfortunately, there was a mass going on, so we only had photos of the outside:
After that, we headed to the town square where we picked a nice shadey area to snack of the lunch we packed that morning.
Piazza del Campo
We contemplated climbing the tower, but to be honest, there was a line, you had to pay, but mostly, we were just lazy. We decided to explore the streets on the other side of the square where we ended up chasing dogs to take photos of them for God Old. We wanted to see whether she'll ooh and ahh over the photos like she did the beagle. Somewhere along the line, we stopped for coffee and I grabbed myself a gelato. Damn its good!
When we looked at our watches, we realised we had about 15mins to get back to the meeting point, after following Moishii for 5mins, nothing was familiar. We dashed back to the Gelato place to ask for directions, and realised we were going in the complete opposite direction. We quickly back tracked and practically ran down the streets of Siena, knocking people over whilst making time to take photos of dogs. We arrived at the meeting point with less than a minute to spare. This is when we started up a conversation with Good Old and her hubby. And apparently her hubby is a school teacher, and because he bought a new walking stick (And offloaded his old one to a Scottish woman) in Siena that was made of metal instead of wood, he can't use it to bash it on student desks anymore. For gods sake, if my teacher ever did that, there would've been hell to pay!!!!
As we make our way back to the bus, Good Old suddenly starts ranting to me about how she got lost in Rome for 3-4hours and ended up getting blisters on her toes even though she was wearing open toed shoes. This went on for 5minutes with her ranting "How can you get a blister on your toe when you're wearing open toed shoes?????". I finally had enough and screamed I was taking photos and ran off!
We all loaded back onto the bus, and off we went to Florence. We got dropped off at some dodgy looking corner where we had to dodge traffic to get into town. Once we got near the town though, its restricted to pedestrians only. So it was great to be able to stroll through the town without worrying about getting run over. We met up with our local tour guide, Nicky, for the day to see the Statue of David. After getting completely toasted in 35+ degree heat, we're finally let into the gallery, where we're told we're not allowed to take photos. Yeh right.
Anyway, David is magnificent. Until you see the sculpture up close, you cannot truely appreciate the beauty of this masterpiece. If you're ever in Florence, this is a MUST, even if you line up for 2 hours!!!
We also did a brief stop at Basilica di Santa Maria del Fiore:
Then we took the long and windey streets through Florence to Sante Croce. Not before we found out that hard way as to why Florence always have a stench about it. People use the streets as a public toilet......ewwwwww
We finally got to Sante Croce after a long walk where we entered the Church for more photos and a historical lesson:
We then went out back to the monestry before heading over to see where the replica of David is displayed.
This is when suddenly, Good Old gets attacked by a mime artists who kidnaps her and runs around the square. Actually, not sure if attacked is the right word considering she practically ran to him! And out of all people he had to choose her! And her hubby! Instead of trying to help, he decided to laugh and take photos, then he offered to give the mime artist a pash.
The last stop was at a leather shop where we got to see a leather demo.
The whole demo took about 2mins and it was all over. Then it was shopping time. Except I couldn't afford anything there! The plainest and cheapest leather bag I saw was about $800euros!! HOLY CWAP! Next thing you know, I get held up by Kath's Husband asking for camera tips. I spent 15mins trying to explain to him that his 1gig memory card can store more photos than his 16mb memory card. I eventually convinced him to go buy a new card, after I offered to burn everything to CD for him just to shut them up! ARGH
By the time I escaped, Moishii had disappeared off with Good Old. He was sitting around the shoe department with her and I quickly jumped into sales mode trying to convince her to buy a pair of 100euro leather shoes! They were "great value"! Meanwhile, Moishii just sat to one side laughing his head off. We decided to abandon the misson to run off and wander the streets ourselves. We ended up grabbing a whole heap of water and postcards, which I'll talk about later.
We finally meet up with the rest of the group and trudge back to the bus. By this time, I'm tired, sunburnt, dehydrated and my back was killing. Seeing our luxuary tour bus with the air conditioning going full blast was the best thing that happened to me that day! We also found out that whilst we were touring Florence, our lovely bus driver Umberto had taken all our suitcases to our hotel (The Sheraton) and all the luggage was already waiting for us in the room and we're handed our keys on the bus. This meant we can literally jump off the bus and run straight into our rooms for a shower.
I'm barely through the door when I hurl all my bags and throw open my suitcase. After a nice relaxing shower and the air conditioning going full blast, my urge to kill had subsided significantly. We get dressed and head off to the dinner room and find out that we're having a buffet dinner that night! We picked the table closest to the buffet table. Enter Tammi, Joe and Prison Break Chick (Daughter of Tammi and Joe). Before we even started a decent conversation with them, we quickly ordered a bottle of wine. Ahhh thats better. Now I can handle socialising. As we're sculling our wine down like no tomorrow, someone said the buffet was open. Me and Moishii throw ourselves at the table, which was a good thing, because the line was so long, some people waited about 15mins to get food. And my god was the food good! We started off with a plate of antipasto, salad and other appetisers. Then we moved onto the main meal of pasta, beef stew, stuffed vegetables and the most delicious lasagne I've ever had. I think everyone went back for seconds!
Whilst we were chatting away with the 3 on our table about the US, TV shows, what Australian's eat for breakfast (Because they think we eat something weird like koalas for breakfast) and other random stuff, we had a special guest appearance from Judy. Who's Judy? No idea at this stage, she plonked herself down half way through dinner, ate and left. Somewhere inbetween, we found out she was trying to contact her lost daughter in Florence. By this stage, the both of us were quite tanked. Moishii more tanked than me because he was drinking from a wine glass twice the size of mine.
When we got up to leave, I swear the room started spinning and Moishii starting tilting as well. We managed to stumble our way back to the elevator when suddenly some guy jumps into the elevator with us. He starts talking to us, and ok, I know I was tipsy, but I wasn't THAT tipsy. I couldn't understand a single word he was saying. We just politely nodded and when we got to our floor, we go off and started walking to our room (Opposite direction from the other guy) when Moishii turned to me and asked me what he said. I replied "I don't know, all I heard was something something short". This started the biggest laughing fit we've had in a year, and barely made it into the room before we collapsed onto the floor in a laughing fit.
In fact, we were having such a bad laughing fit, Moishii gave me his asthma spray which I attempted to use. But since I've never had asthma I couldn't even get the spray to work properly and ended up choking when I did get it working. I blame the fact that I was tipsy, and laughing so hard I couldn't see because I had tears in my eyes.
We also turned on the TV, when suddenly we see a chick looking like she was having a painful orgasm followed by a guy with a fish in his ass. Then somewhere along the line, the chick is having her period and is running through the supermarket looking for pads and was leaving a trail of blood behind her. No I wasn't THAT drunk. Its REALLY a movie. A Hollywood movie infact!
I didn't know whether to laugh or be disgusted, either way, it wasn't the best movie to watch before passing out for the night. But it did inspire us to send a postcard to Cherry:
