Sunday 12.9.10
Got up and there was breakfast for the hotel guests. It was pretty good. I don't remember the specifics (sorry again, I waited like half a year to write this. My notes only say 'delicious breakfast') but I believe there were a lot of rolls and spreads involved.
I left my luggage at the hotel and went to the train station to book my sleeper car to Vienna. While standing in the ticket line, I met some women who worked at University of California Santa Cruz. They were all very friendly, and seemed amazed that someone as young as myself was travelling across Europe alone. Upon their recommendation I went to try to book a ticket into the museum that contains Michelangelo's famous David sculpture. However, I think they weren't letting people book tickets in advance or something.
Instead of waiting in the extremely long line, I decided to go check out Florence. I started wandering around, some Italian guy came up to me and asked me for twenty cents (I didn't give it to him) and I crossed the Ponte Vecchio, which is a pretty cool bridge that looks like this:
It has a lot of shops and that sort of thing on it these days, but it's a pretty ancient structure. After crossing the Arno (the river that runs through Florence) I climbed up a hill to the Piazzo Michelangelo, a kind of square on a big hill overlooking the city, which a good view of the city scape. One can see the Duomo and take some good photos.
There is a bronze copy of the David.
After a while I returned to the city and found this square (I believe it was called the Piazza Vecchio) outside the Uffizi (a pretty famous art gallery) with a bunch of very delightful statues. Here's one:
There was also a collection of statues of famous Florentines, including da Vinci, Michelangelo, Dante Alighieri, Macchiavelli, Amerigo Vespucci, and Galileo. I managed to find the church in which Dante is buried. Dante has been an object of great respect for me since I read the Divine Comedy. I thought about buying a flower or something and entering to pay my respects, but in the end I think I decided I didn't want to spend the time and Euros when there where still other things I wanted to do in Florence. I did take a photo of this giant statue of him outside the church though.
I came across the Via Dante Alighieri (via seems to mean street or ally in Italian) on my way to the Duomo. Once in the Duomo I took some pictures of nice-looking things, including a pretty famous painting of Dante and his Divine Comedy afterlife-world and the inside of the giant dome, which is well-decorated.
After this I went to stand in line to get into the Galleria Accademia, which is a pretty nice museum but is mostly famous because it houses Michelangelo's David, which is pretty much the most well-known piece of art in the world. They had an exhibit on musical instruments and some other stuff that I really enjoyed, but the David is really something else. I managed to snap a photo before I realised they were forbidding this, but I'm sure you can find much more flattering images online somewhere. I will say this though: it was a completely different experience being in the room with that sculpture, circling it and studying it from different angles, and taking in the details. It's amazing. It took my breath away. I could have stared at it for hours, and I am not exaggerating. I tried to go see other wings of the museum, but I kept coming back to look at David. It really is perfect. It's an exquisite statue, and definitely deserves the reputation it has.
On the way back to my hotel, I kept my eye out for an internet café or something with internet access, but didn't find anything. I got my luggage from my hotel and sat down to complete my blog and write my paper, which were due soon. I typed until my laptop died, then put the stuff on a flash drive, found an internet point in the train station, and uploaded it on one of their computers. This internet place was super sketchy. It looked pretty dirty and the computers were slow, and it was really crowded. In my notes for today I wrote, 'internet point, totally sketchy, kids checking facebook, shitty keyboard.'
Anyway I turned in all my work and went back up to the platforms to wait for my sleeper train to Vienna. However, I found out that the employees of the Italian national rail company (in Europe, each country has its own government rail company that pretty much operates all of its trains) were on strike that day, so all of the trains in Italy were very delayed. I found this really chill English couple who were about my age, and who were also waiting for this train. We decided to wait together, and after figuring out what was going on with the strike, settled down to talk. I remember that one of the things they asked me was whether Americans really drank from red plastic cups at parties. It seems that this is an American cliché that has charmed the European population. I had never heard before this that we were the only country that brought plastic cups to parties, or that it was considered comical by other nations. We talked abut a lot of other things, probably what we were doing in Italy and the university systems in our respective countries or something. We also ate pretzels during this time. After two and a half hours of waiting an Austrian train arrived to rescue us. My English friends were bound for Salzburg and so got on a different part of the train that would disattach in the middle of the night and head in another direction. I found my sleeper car and managed some position that wasn't too uncomfortable with my most valuable belongings next to me where they would be difficult to steal. I think one of the employees came around to ask me what I wanted for breakfast in the morning. The beds were arranged kind of like submarine bunks, with the mattress very close to one another to fit the maximum number of people in each car, and you were sleeping in this kind of slit. Anyway I slept pretty well and in the morning someone came around with breakfast, the price of which was included in your ticket, so that was nice.
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