Florence has been a RANDOM one.. A small town with no metro system renowned for it's leather, food, wine and churches per square metre has delivered us crackhead football players, flash floods, heaps of people from Philidelphia and an angry, angry toilet.
We booked accommodation last second so we had little idea what Dany House really was until we got there. It was quite literally a house, named after the owners mother, rented out to up to 16 backpackers at a time, and supervised by the Rastafarian man Clifford who didn't leave the hostel once in the some 100-ish hours we spent there. The place was crammed full of Philidelphians for some reason, checking in and out in a constant stream, from which we learned the depressing truth that they didn't invent Philidelphia cream cheese!! It must be a sore topic too because when I asked one girl why they took credit for the cheese she replied "Go ask a wombat!". Possibly the worst comeback ever, but she seemed upset so I let it go. Apparently the real Phili cuisine is called 'water ice', which sounds bland I know, but so does the Aussie word 'ice block' if you think about it.. (referring to something like a Popsicle or Icypole for those randoms who aren't familiar with that term). Another thing about Dany house I noticed was that every night ended with Steve teaching a dumbfounded American to solve a Rubix Cube.
We ate all our lunches across the road from our hostel at this amazing local panini place where I had my first Italian espresso. Ridiculously good. We became such regulars there, ordering number 9's and 13's all day, that when we asked where the local DVD rental place was the barrista Francesco offered to give us a lift on the way home. So the five of us crammed into the four remaining car seats and for the first time were on the inside of the maniacal killing machine that is the Italian-driven car, as opposed to the outside. While ignoring all traffic lights and pedestrians Francesco turned up the music and shouted over it to us asking whether we liked soccer. He then whipped out his phone and watched with us a YouTube video of him, Francesco Flachi number 10 in the Italian team Sampadoria scoring a goal. We were being driven by an ex-football player who now owned a sandwich shop! He dropped us off and later when home we looked him up. Seems ol' Francesco had the sniffles if you know what I mean - suspended for 10 years from Italian football due to cocaine doping. It's strange how the most random occurrences like that eventful car ride are just commonplace when you're backpacking... That's something I'm gonna miss.
Something I'm not going to miss nearly as much is the toilet in my room at Dany House. After a long and suspicious visit to the bathroom by a Philidelphian girl the toilet became very, very angry. Enraged it growled loudly every 10 seconds for like 2 days, which made for bad sleeping and guilt-ridden defecation.
Moving on from my perhaps overused topic of poo, (I only said 'perhaps' Joel, I'm sure there'll be more toilet humour to come, don't worry) and onto the topic of nightlife. In Florence there is none. Our biggest night out saw us at an Australian friend's apartment with her roomates, five fine-art students making a stormtrooper costume out
of cardboard and dental floss in preparation for Halloween.
We also rented segways for a couple hours as a quick, fun way to climb to the top of the famous lookout over all of Florence. For those who have never heard of a segway, google it. Funnest way to get around ever!
Yesterday we decided to book the rest of our transport and accommodation up until the end of the trip. Bad move. Had we waited one day we'd have learned that our accommodation and trains to and from the beautiful Cinque Terre isn't so useful when the main town of Monterosso has been wiped off the face of the planet by flash floods.. The mayor himself has stated "Monterosso no longer exists". There are 8 dead and more missing. Needless to say we applied for a refund on our 3 booked trains, which the company ensures us that we may well get - in 6 to 8 months. Yay. Substantially out of pocket and disappointed that weather has stopped us from visiting two would-be trip highlights, the Colosseum and
Cinque Terre, we regrouped and assessed the scenario, deciding to replace those two nights with a stint in Bologna, because I could go a nice
bolognese. And that's how my birthday began. A bit of a bittersweet one, sweetened further when Steve gave me the sweetest surprise of all - a Kinder Surprise! The toy is a snowboarder that shoots from a lodge down any surface you choose! :D
So that was the randomness of Florence. We did the David and the Duomo and the leather markets and all that, but if I've learned anything these 4 months it's that the sights are rarely the most memorable part of a backpacker's day..

A short train later and we were in Pisa, where we took photos of, amongst others, Gavin eating tower, Steven pooing tower, Arryn smoking tower, Zac living tower like ice cream and Aidan making a birthday '19' with the tower, and piled back on the train to Bologna. Job well done.