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".