And, unsurprisingly, Florence III

Saturday
'Twas a rainy morning, so we weren't quite as motivated to get our touristing on, but when we finally did get to town we went straight to the duomo (common nickname for the cathedral Santa Maria del fiore) to climb the 436 steps in the campanile. The pictures probably weren't as good as on a sunny day but it was still a pretty good view and we got our leg workout for the day. We then checked out the inside of the cathedral (which we hadn't been able to do the day before because I absentmindedly wore shorts, which are not allowed). The inside is surprisingly simple, without the ornate decorations that we saw in many other churches. There is, however, a massive fresco on the inside of the dome, depicting the final judgement and the dead rising out of their graves and heaven and hell. It is 3600 square meters of intense.

It was still raining quite a lot at that point, so we went to the central market. We were rather overwhelmed by all the amazing stands with fresh fruit, fresh meat, fresh fish, lots of varieties of alcohol. We found a nice place to have some lunch and stayed inside until the rain let up...sort of. We made our way to the Boboli gardens and the sun came out just in time for us to enjoy 2 hours of wandering around the gardens, taking pictures and admiring the impeccable landscape. A floating island, Cyprus alley, a Danish family that we happened to meet near the main statue. It was all very lovely :)

Sunday we walked around the olive grove since we hadn't done it before. We got the bottoms of our pants all soggy but it was worth it to see the property and the view from the hilltop. Finally we ate our Italian breakfast and departed for Cinque Terre.

That will be the start of another post

As I (and this post) are currently lacking good transitions, this is Florence II

Friday
Bike tour:
Piazza Della Republica (the location of the old city, when it was merely a fort built up for soldiers)
Piazza Della Signoria
Palazzo Vecchio (location of the Capitol building)
Ponte Vecchio (very old, adorable bridge with tiny little gold shops. It used to be a place for selling meat because they could just dump any bad or unsold meat into the river and it would wash downstream to Pisa (whom the Florentines did not like) but since the Medici family used that area, they didn't want it to smell bad, so they changed it to just gold shops.
Pitti Palace (with over 1000 rooms, you can go there to have a 'pity' party, as the Pitti family did when the Medici family bought out this beautiful palace from them)  Also the location of the Boboli gardens that we visited later
Holy Trinity Plaza
A leather market
Santa Maria Novella (and plaza)
Duomo- more accurately known as the cathedral de Santa Maria del fiore. ("Of the flowers." Because the symbol for Florence is the flour de lis.) It is often called the duomo (as most big European churches are) for the Latin word for house. And also because of the giant dome, which is the main feature of the Florence cathedral. It is the largest dome in Europe. And this cathedral is the 3rd, right behind St. Peter's Basilica and Milan's duomo (which I've also had the privilege to see and to climb). It actually took 25 years after. Te cathedral was built for an architect to figure out how to build the dome that large. And then after he finished and before he died, he burnt the plans. So they are still trying to figure out how he actually made it work.

After the bike tour Michael and I set off on our own. We went to the Galleria Dell'academia,which houses Michaelangelo's David and other important statues and paintings. Michael had downloaded a walking audio guide by Rick Steves so he and I shared headphones and followed Rick Steves' helpful and amusing directions through the museum. It may have looked weird but I loved it! It was a great way to get a lot of interesting information out of the museum, which is something I can admittedly be bad at sometimes. I get museum-ed easily (similar to how my mom and I say we feel "malled" after Abby makes us shop too much). But in Florence, you gotta just push through the pain cause there is so much to see!

After the academia, we got some good Italian food from a restaurant on the square of the duomo. Well, it would have been good Italian food, except that I didn't know the difference between salt and sugar and ended up with some very sugary cheese, which is a very VERY unpleasant experience. Michael agreed to find a place for me to get chocolate because I was pretty unhappy about my food faux paus. Sugary cheese is just not a taste you want to stay in your mouth very long. Or in your imagination. I have to stop talking about it now.

After that we went to the Uffizi, which is the Italian word for office. It is one of the most important museums and is housed in what was the Medici family's office building, hence the name. We also did a Rick Steves guide for that, which was useful because we probably could have spent upwards of 4 hours in there on our own, but we got there at 430 ish and it closed at 7 and we kind of had to rush through the end. There is currently a lot of renovation on the building so there were a few rooms we didn't get to see.

Our last sightseeing stop of the night was Piazza Michaelangelo, which is a nice public square up on a hill overlooking the town. We watched sunset from there and played a good round of hackysack. Add that location to my list :)

Walking back along the river, we ate dinner at a cute restaurant along lungarno, which we think means "along the Arno river".

Florence

It will be somewhat hard to write about Florence because our days were jam packed so not only is there a ton to write about, but I also didn't do any of the writing at the time. All 3 days we left our adorable bed and breakfast by 9am and came home somewhere around 10 or 11Pm. Our B and B was a 20 minute bus ride and a 10 minute uphill walk away from the city. This was awesome because it gave us peace and quiet and a great view, but it meant we packed for the whole day and just stayed in the city until it was time to go to bed.

Florence is an incredible, exciting city. We bought the Firenze card (Firenze is how you say Florence in Italian) which gave us free entrance to many of the city's millions of museums for 72 hours. I think we packed enough in that it was well worth it. The first day we did a bike tour of the city because we figured that would be a good way to see the main sights, get a good feel of how to get around the city and learn some of the history. It did all of the above, and gave us gelato! Our guide was great and I learned a ton about the city and the family that ruled the city for many hundreds of years, the Medici family.  The Medici family was behind most of the buildings that we visited and much of the artwork that we saw. I'll just list the places we went and give little descriptions. Otherwise this post will be waaaaay too long for anyone to enjoyably read.

Thursday
Arrived in Florence. We almost just camped out in our B and B in the evening but we decided to go into the city to get our bearings. We walked around, saw some churches, saw the church....the Cathedral de Santa Maria del Fiore....and then got dinner at a nice place on piazza Della republica. Since it was our first night in Italy, we just had to follow dinner with some gelato....of course. we ate it while sitting by palazzo vecchio while admiring the many statues of the square's  'open air museum', then we found our bus stop and headed "home".

From Austria to Italy

Also known as, from snow covered mountains to green covered mountains. Michael and I both slept for the first half of the first leg of our train ride to Florence. We left Innsbruck at 927 am, waved goodbye to innsbruck's beautiful mountains and made our way into gorgeous Italy. I tried to stay awake to see the sights along the way but anyone who knows me knows how bad I am at actually staying awake in a moving vehicle. I didn't get to sit by Michael or by the window so I did a lot of head bobbing, eyes closed, startled waking up, just to go back to sleep again. I'm sure I looked ridiculous. Finally I opened my eyes and saw beautiful green fields with adorable houses and villages nestled onto the sides of mountains and I urged myself to wake up so I could see more. Michael and I went to the food car and ordered a light lunch and drinks mostly so we could sit together and have a good view. We took many pictures, oohed and aahhed (that part was mostly me) at the adorable villages, and met a guy from Texas who said that he "knew we were one of them" (the Americans, we presume). Now we have about half an hour left on the first leg of the trip. We will get off at Verona and take another train to bologna. From there it will be a short ride to Florence.  And then m and I will find the bus that will take us to our countryside olive grove bed and breakfast. It looked wonderful online so I'm very excited. I think they will have a dog.

Last day in Innsbruck

To follow the last post, Tuesday afternoon after we had our adventure in Hungerburg we went to the Tyrolean folk art museum in Innsbruck. I wasn't sure what to expect but it was an impressive museum! We had a cool reading guide machine thingy which we pointed at the barcode tag in front of each exhibit and the laser scanned it and pulled up information. It was a pretty neat way to see the museum and to learn a lot about the cultural history of the area. I honestly didn't know that much about Tyrolean culture so I was grateful we had the chance to learn about it a bit.
We also visited the church that is right beside the museum and we were lucky enough to visit it right in the middle of an organ concert. Every church,every single church, that we've seen in Europe has a fancy organ. Churches differ in their fanciness and ornateness, but the organ is always impressive. So we admired the decorations and listened to the organ music. Not a bad way to see a church.

We wrapped that night up with dinner at the Ottoburg, one of the oldest buildings in the city, which has now been turned into a local cuisine restaurant. It was originally built sometime around the 1300s. It's a beautiful building and our cute little table was next to a window that looked out to the mountains. We ate our Austrian-style ravioli (with spinach and multiple types of delicious cheese) and Wiener schnitzel, which was a little too heavily fried but not bad otherwise.
Gotta try the local specialties ;)


Our last day in Innsbruck was a little chilly but we got up early to walk around Hofgarten, a gorgeous garden in the middle of the city. It basically means the garden for royalty. The Hofburg, right beside the garden, is the royal palace. And the hofkirke was the royal church that we had visited the day before. We walked through it as the sun came up and as business people in suits passed by on their morning commute. We also were passed by a group of school children on what appeared to be their morning laps around the garden. Almost all of the were jogging, even though they were in normal school clothes.  They were working up a sweat and...get this...they even seemed to be enjoying it. Think we could talk American children, and their teachers, in to spending a half an hour running a mile around a city garden before school?

We spent the rest of the day visiting the Swarovski crystal shop/exhibition area (because we decided not to go to the gigantic crystal museum, which I'm a little sad about, but it was too far away to really be worth it), climbing up the Stadturn, a tower that gave us a great view of the city, and visiting other churches. Our other big adventure of that day was renting bikes and exploring the city on wheels. On our way to get the bikes, it started to rain so we went to this museum I had noticed earlier. It was called Audioversum and it was developed and run by a prominent cochlear-implant company (that we, as silly Americans, had never heard of). It was awesome! We got to play sound localizing and 'guess that sound' games. We had a super cool guide who took us through the entire museum and we were the only people in there. We got to watch 3d videos of how sound is transducer which was super fun because we are both huge nerds. I had learned recently n my med neuro class about sound transduction and the cochlea, auditory cranial nerve and other brain areas responsible for sensing sound so it was fun to see how they had put that into interactive exhibits.

We finally got our bikes and it turned out to be a pretty nice day for riding. We rode up to the bergiesel, the famous ski jump of Innsbruck. I have some incredible pictures from the top of that, as it is a fairly high point in the city. In front of the ski jump is the city of Innsbruck and behind it is rugged terrain and mountains. If Innsbruck ever gets to be the site for the Winter Olympics again, I'll be able to say that I've been there :)

We rode to 3 more churches and then spent 10 minutes at a modern art museum right before it closed. Michael is a fan of churches and I'm a huge fan of modern art. So it was a win-win.

That pretty much sums it up for Innsbruck. The pictures will speak to how beautiful the area is. Ill be sure to post some

Innsbruck

Monday

It was a bit of a blessing that our bags didn't end up making it to Innsbruck with us, because then we didn't have to carry them through the city. We didn't get them as soon as we had hoped, but they did finally arrive at our hostel Tuesday evening. Turns out it isn't so hard to manage with just one outfit for two whole days. No makeup, no medicine, one iPhone charger, no socks, one pair of underwear. And yet we managed and actually really enjoyed it. But I was glad when they did come and it was nice to put on a clean shirt.

Monday evening, after we checked in to the hostel, we walked around the city and realized that our hostel really was very very close to all of the main sights. We were able to see the Goldenes Dachl (roof) right away and some churches and important statues that were nearby. In front of a statue called St. Anne's column, Michael said something about how he never asked anyone to take his picture by any landmarks during the rest of his trip when he was by himself.  A nearby local girl heard us (which is not surprising since we Americans tend to be very loud) and said " shall I take your picture?" We were mildly embarrassed but laughed a lot and said yes, thanks! And so now we have a lovely photo :)

After that we walked more and found ourselves at a cool plaza/fountain/skatepark near the triumphforte (the iconic landmark in Innsbruck, which depicts on one side, wedding festivities of a prince, but because his father died during the celebration, the other side of the arch depicts the great sadness).

Having found ourselves in this wide open and beautiful plaza, it only made sense to play hackysack. Basically Michael is the best hacky buddy I've ever had.  When I was in Europe before, I played by myself many many times, and always wanted a friend to join me. Now he and I can hacky all over Europe :)

So far the list of places we've played is the Larsen's house, King's Garden in Copenhagen, and that skate park. Im sure we'll be adding to it soon.


Anyway, after hacky, we went to pick up food but didn't realize it was a holiday on Monday (Whitsunday) so everything closed very early. We just barely made it to a supermarket to buy cheese, peppers and some apples. Back at the hostel, Michael cooked up a nice dinner of pasta with the aforementioned ingredients and some spices he had bought earlier during his trip.

And thus concluded our first day in Innsbruck :)


Tuesday was a beautiful day, but it's a good thing we both wore layers because we  ended up on top of a mountain and, who would've guessed, it was really cold!! It was windy and there was snow, but it was completely worth it. We had an amazing view of Innsbruck and of the river Inn that runs through Innsbruck (can you guess where the city gets its name?) We spent a lot of time hanging out on the mountain, watching sheep, pointing out different mountains, walking around in the snow and of course, taking tons of pictures. Finally our fingers and noses got cold enough that we took the cable car partway down the mountain and explored the village of Hungerburg. We were just planning to look at some houses and take more pictures but we stumbled upon a cute little church so we examined it from the outside and, when we saw that the side door was open, we explored the inside too. We were incredibly lucky to be approached by a man who turned out to be the pastor of the little church. He told us all about the different frescoes on the walls and the history of the church itself. There was a small language barrier but he did pretty well speaking English and we loved hearing all about this church and area that he obviously loves. He even asked if we were hungry and invited us in for cake and coffee. Neither of us actually drinks coffee, but how could we say no to that?? So we accepted and had a wonderful time eating cake from a local restaurant and some bread that a nun at the church baked. We chatted of our trip, his trip to the US (North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia), more history of the church, McDonald's, skiing and the most important things to see in Innsbruck. We must stayed for over an hour but when when finished the cake and bread and coffee and homemade lemon "citron", a refreshing natural lemon juice, Peter walked us all the way down to the cable car station. He pointed out interesting buildings and told us stories on the way.  As I'm sure Michael will mention in his future guest post in my blog, it was all in all an accidentally awesome encounter

Luggageless in Innsbruck

I'll preface this by saying that we do in fact now have our bags and all our belongings are intact. It honestly wasn't too much of an ordeal to not have our luggage for 2 days, but it was a little nerve-wracking, which is why I didn't tell anyone back home that we lost them (sorry mom!).

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 We've made it to our second destination- Innsbruck. Well, we have made it to the airport. But currently, no further. And our bags did not make it with us. We are pretty sure we will get them this evening because there's another flight coming in from Frankfurt. Our layover was quite short in Frankfurt....and our flight in was a bit delayed, meaning Michael and I were those crazy people running through the airport.  And because it was Frankfurt, we were running through the airport, up and down stairs, around many corners, and finally on to a bus for whom we were the only passengers.  A nice Turkish bus driver special-delivered us to the very far away loading site of our tiny turboprop plane.  Along the way he regaled us with stories of when he drove Lady Gaga around the airport (she is short and has very big yellow hair) and Heidi Clune, who was supposedly visiting her husband. . Oh and snoop dogg. He's met snoop dogg. So that was cool. Our nice Turkish bus driver didn't have the best English but we rather enjoyed his tales. He also played some party tunes and told us to come back and find him when we get married (earlier he said to me "this time, friends. next time...married.") He got us to the plane just in time....and then there was another 10 minute delay because of weather, haha.The flight was short and a little bumpy but the scenery was beautiful, as it is here. Outside the airport (where we are waiting for a city bus) we are faced with snowcapped mountains, on top of which are luminescent clouds. The blue sky is peaking through in lots of places though and while it is a bit windy, it is a nice day to be walking around downtown. Which is the plan as soon as we can catch the bus to city central.

Im hoping the bags come tonight or tomorrow morning...otherwise Michael and I will be taking lots of pictures wearing our new Star Alliance tshirts, which were generously given by the lost and found desk here.

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