Day 7

Before we arrived at Florence we stopped off at Pisa and saw the tower. It was worth while – but it seems that taking a photo where you align yourself so that it appears that you are holding up the tower isn’t as original as you might suspect. Almost everyone there was doing it and it was pretty amusing to see a field of people with their right arm out all smiling. In my quest to find an ATM here I almost got sucked into buying a trinket that I didn’t need. An African man asked if Christina (Canadian – not the tour guide) who I was walking with had been to Africa because of her Ugandan bag (she did some volunteer work there) and said that she could have a model elephant as a good luck gift and that I could have one too as I was her boyfriend. I said ‘Gratsi’ and took it and started to walk off feeling like I had already had a stroke of good luck at finding such a cool fella – but then he started asking for money and refusing to take the trinket back, so I placed it on his arm and walked off. I then practised my Italian. I had been told a line off Caitlin that means ‘you are a very beautiful woman’ so I said ‘to say uno bella donna’ to the lady that served me ice-cream, and she laughed at me, pronounced it properly and then turned around. Yah, go me! I said it to a lady earlier and she just smiled at me, and then Caitlin over heard her saying in a strong American accent “wow did you just hear what that guy said to me!” – there were a lot of tourists…
Florence – now this place was nice to look at but didn’t really grab me like some places did. We had a tour of the city and were told about a lot of the statutes that were being displayed in the square –and they were pretty cool – really graphic but very cool. I quite liked the one of Hercules beating up a centaur. We also got a leather making demonstration which was entertaining, but I didn’t buy anything, way too expensive, and again nothing said ‘Justin – you need me’. Actually I have never encountered anything that has said that too me – until I walked into a wooden toy shop across the road from the leather demonstration, and I saw a wooden sword. There was quite a variety, but what really called my name was a medium length weapon. The hilt was just the right size for my hand and I could imagine the shoo shoo sound that it would make when I would wield it. It cost 10 euro, and the sheath cost anther ten, but it made it so much more desirable as I could wear it a lot more frequently. I bought it and wore it several times through out the rest of the tour, and used it generally to fight off evil and to point at things. That night we went to a club called ‘space electronic’ which was really crazy. There were those cages up high where people could dance and there were heaps of people. As it turned out a great deal of them would have been between sixteen and eighteen, as that is the legal age for going out in Italy – the boys in our tour had a field day. I left at about 2:30.