When I arrived in Florence my first order of business was to find some wifi so I could check my email to see if I had a host for the night. Seeing as how Florence is in Italy this proved to be a much tougher task than it should have. First I went to the Maccas in the train station. Maccas almost always have wifi. Not in Italy though. This McDonald's was in a kind of food court and the only wifi connection was the name of a cafe which I couldn't even find in the food court and the password was apparently on your receipt. Well since I couldn't even find the place I figured maybe they just sponsored the wifi and a receipt from any place in this food court would have the password. Turns out I was wrong.

So I left the train station and was pleased to see a Maccas just down the road. So I gave that one a shot. But although it had wifi, I couldn't seem to connect to it. So I wandered around a little and found a Burger King. After signing up to their wifi and receiving my SMS with my login details it proceeded to tell me that I was unable to login. So here I am starting to think I'm going to be homeless tonight just because I couldn't find and damn working wifi.

Eventually after walking around for a bit I did manage to connect to the wifi at the second Maccas I was at only to find I had no CS acceptance anyway. So I booked a hostel which was only a 5 minute walk away. It was actually one of the more expensive hostels I've booked, but it also had probably the highest rating I have seen on HostelBookers and most of the reviews praised the owner Nadina. So I thought I'd give it a shot.

Well this didn't go quite right either. When I got to the hostel I couldn't get in. I was able to connect to their wifi though and after looking the place up again I realised that it said there wasn't 24 hour reception and that I should email them with the time I was going to arrive. So I sent Nadina an email saying I was already there. She showed up an hour later and let me in, checked me in and everything. Then offered me free coffee and wine. She was super friendly and I already started to see where all these reviews were coming from. The next morning when I realised that she makes breakfast for everyone in the hostel just cemented the opinion really. This was a tiny hostel, only 15 beds or so and it was one of the best I've stayed in.

I had a few things on my agenda in Florence. First was to see David, second was to go the Uffizi Museum and third was to take a day trip to Pisa. I already had tickets booked for both David and the Uffizi. David on the Sunday and Uffizi on Tuesday (all museums were closed every Monday). In hindsight I should have just done both of these on the same day because the museum David was in took all of 30 minutes to see and the Uffizi was only about 2 hours or so. Both pretty cool, but neither needed a full day.

I wasn't really sure what to expect of David. I mean, I'd seen hundreds of pictures of him already and I've seen hundreds of other marble statues already on this trip, most hundreds or even thousands of years older than David. But I'll be damned if there just wasn't something about that statue. It's just so perfect in pretty much every way. Ridiculous detail down to the veins in his hands. Definitely worth seeing in person.

On Monday I took a day trip to Pisa although a day was more than enough. Just like with David I wasn't really expecting to be all that impressed by the tower but was. Again it's just something that it doesn't matter how many pictures you've seen, it's just something else in person. I didn't even know until going there that the tower is actually the bell tower of the nearby cathedral. It's quite rare for the bell tower to actually be a separate tower, yet both Pisa and Florence have them.

I even took the photo of holding it up. Wasn't sure if I was going to bother but I was with a guy from the hostel and when he was taking a photo of me in front of the tower he said I should just do it, so I did. We also had fun going around watching all the other people do it. Looks funny from other angles. We also looked into going up the tower but it was 18 euros. And honestly the only thing to really see there is the tower itself anyway.

Being such a small hostel, almost everyone there got to know each other which was awesome. So between doing all this other stuff I was going out to dinner and drinks with various people each night. There was even a microbrewery right around the corner of the hostel which did some pretty awesome beer. They also made these really awesome pizza dough ball things which were delicious and went really well with beer.

The day before I left I went up the bell tower of the cathedral in Florence. This seemed like a much better option than the one in Pisa as Florence is actually a beautiful city worth having a look over from above. Actually, the cathedral itself was rather odd. Looked absolutely amazing from the outside. One of the nicest to looked at from the outside actually. But it's very plain on the inside. Even the roof is just plain white which is rather odd from what I've seen in most cathedrals so far.

I was going to go to Venice next, but then I remembered I need to book for The Last Supper in Milan. And when I looked into it, it was fully booked for about 2 weeks except for Thursday, so I booked it and changed my plans to go to Milan and then Venice.

When I left the hostel Nadina told me to go to the liquor store across the road and tell the guy "I have a beer from my friends" and I'd get a free beer. Everything about that hostel was amazing.