Ciao

Good day today in Florence! Kind of a funny story...yesterday I was talking to my parents and my mom asked if we have had any problems with people in hostels (i.e. people who snore, talk loudly, etc). Well, we haven't had much of a problem with that until last night when this guy in our hostel room was snoring SOO loud! Of course, I am sort of used to this as some people in my family (I won't mention any names, but you know who you are!) snore really loud. But for some reason last night it was really bothering me and I couldn't sleep too well. So long story short, we slept-in for awhile this morning! We started off the day by walking around the city...Florence is relatively small so you can pretty much walk anywhere you want to go. We walked over to where Brittany stayed while she was here over the summer...we were also searching for a gelateria that she recommended as the "best gelato in the world." I have to say, it was delicious. We really wanted to see Michaelangelo's David today, but the Academia (where it is located) is closed on Mondays (we will have to go on Wed). However, Florence actually has 2 other David's (replicas, of course) and we saw one of those. We also went to the "La cattedrale di Santa Maria del Fiore" where the famous Duomo by Brunelleschi is also located. The cathedral is the 4th largest cathedral in the world so you can imagine how big it is! It has been really neat for me to see Florence because I spent lots of time learning about the Italian Renaissance in European History in high school and now I get to see it all up close! Anyways, tomorrow we are actually taking the train to Rome for the day....about 1.5 hour train ride. We are probably going to be squeezing a lot into one day :)