Florence

The hotel we were staying in was away from the main city in the residential area. We had breakfast early and then set out to discover Florence. This is where my cold started showing its first symptoms. However, at that time, it was something that seemed very strange. My left eye kept on watering constantly. Believe me, I must have used up several hundreds of tissue on it.

We walked around the main church, but did not go in. The area around it was full of people and it was really hot. After the beautiful church, we went to this place like a courtyard which had replicas of the famous status including, the famous statue of David. The beauty just overwhelms you. We had made up our mind to go to Uffizi Gallery so we did not spend too much of time there. Once we reached it however there were about 200 people ahead of us. However, we slowly realized that this was not moving as fast as we thought it would.

At Uffizi, its a good idea to book tickets online since there is no wait there. The people in line were telling how the typical wait is about 3-4 hours. Since this was the main thing we wanted to do, we decided to wait. Made a few friends while waiting, a french couple from Canada, a girl from Korea who had come all the way to see the "birth of Venus". The reason it takes so long is because they allow only 30 people in at a time. Also, the constant eye watering was not helping.

We drowned a lot of coffee and lunched on the steps eating some Paninis. Finally once we got in, we were told that we could not take the camera in and so Neeraj was totally bummed out. I think he lost half the interest once he found out that he could not take pictures. We went around looking for the famous pictures like the "birth of Venus", a couple of Michelangelos. The paintings are beautiful. However the lack of knowledge of Christianity made things very confusing. Whenever there was a good picture, we stood next to the guided tour guides to understand more. We also purchased a book about Florence, so we knew the key paintings to look at.

Once in, we again had some coffee on the terrace and then headed out. We probably spent less time than average people. But Neeraj was getting impatient and my eye was driving me nuts.
When we came out, it was past 5:30. We took the bus back and picked up our luggage and came back to the train station to go to Treviso.

We were going there only because there was an airport there and it was close to Venice. Florence is a city that you need to give time to do justice. It has so many things to do, like the house of Michelangelo, museums, galleries. We will defnitely love to come back and spend idyllic time under the Tuscan sun....