I LOVE Florence. I love it I love it I love it. I am so tempted to miss my train, find some cute appartment by the river and live out the rest of my life eating chilli chocolate flavoured gelato, amazing risotto and drinking amazing coffee while speaking such a gorgeous language!

Milan on the other hand... well, it was a um... interesting experience. Quite disasterous from the start to be honest. Missing our train connection in Geneva thanks to the typical lateness of french trains... not really complaining, loved Geneva - stunning setting, the clearest water running through a city that I've ever seen, pity that we could afford absolutely nothing!

Losing/having wallet stolen from bag (?) on train to Milan was definitely not a highlight... goodbye credit card, wad of cash, drivers license but possibly worst of all - the mass amount of french 'cartes' that I have spent the last month trekking around the city organising!! AHHHHHHHH. Rushing around the train station trying to catch train before it left again, visiting the tourist info, lost luggage place and the 2 hour Italian police office experience was definitely not what we had planned for our uni break!

Train delay meant that our hostel cancelled our room we had booked online... we were then made to wait (at about 11pm, sans dinner) for over an hour while the guy surfed the net until we were taken to the other part of the hostel. A car ride worthy of the Tanzanian death bus (a trip my mum and sis can no doubt recall with such fond memories of hurtling through the serengeti) with equally ear drum blasting music.

The next days were filled with getting hideously lost in Milan, finding museums closed or not finding them at all, trekking around in search of markets that were piles of empty cardboard boxes by the time we arrived, hostel breakfasts of aeroplane like bread... ahh Milan, not somewhere I would rush back to... ever.

BUT lets be glad that Florence is AMAZING!!! Getting off our train we were approached by a woman from a hostel, not usually for going with random train station tourist poacher but she seemed very honest and turned out to be such a good decision. We have a triple room in their gorgeous family home right in the centre of town. So far we have visited an amazing cathedral, walked across the famous old bridge overlooking the super cute buildings on each side of the river, sampled a lot of amazing gelato (coconut and chilli-chocolate are definitely top of the list), had ab giving laughs, thick italian style hot chocolates, admired multiple piazzas and repeatedly exclaimed how much we all just LOVE florence!!