Florence, Italy

18th - 19th July

Florence top tip: If you ever head to Florence be sure to find a shop called phinocchio, not to be confused with rip off rivals pinocchio. phinocchio is seen as the cremede la crème of gelato shops (Italian "AMAZING" ice cream) serving the best gelato for miles around. Word of warning, you will probably need to allow about an hour to decide what flavour you want as there are around four hundred to choose from. Just to confirm that's 400! Crazy huh?

As we said in the last blog we didn't stop in Florence long, we stayed just one night and didn't arrive until around 5pm. Now one this to remember if you travel anywhere especially if you don't speak the local lingo and that is directions to the place you are staying, so when you forget this and have no map or idea where you are meant to be staying its not very helpful. Luckily for us we met a welsh coach driver who had just dropped people off in the same place as we were dropped, he was kind enough to help us find our hostel using his sat nav not only this but he gave us a bottle of the coldest water we had seen in about three weeks which was amazing.

So now with some idea of where to go we set off on route to the hostel, which should only take us around half hour so not too bad. Forty minutes later we had found it. To be perfectly honest we though it was going to be a dive as from the street you couldn't see it, you had to walk down a small ally between the most unlikely buildings (A church and a supermarket) but lucky once you past the dodgy little alleyway, you were greeted by a big forecourt and a lovely little seating area. Our room was located up the biggest staircase you have ever seen and at the end of the longest hallway you have ever seen. This place was Massive! The room was huge also, very clean and we only had to share with two other people. The most anti-social people in the world I might add, they didn't say a single word the whole time we were there, not even hello (plain rude).

Now tired and hungry we set off in search of food we could either toast or microwave as these were the hostels only cooking facilities. The supermarket next door was small and had only a large selection of seafood and bread. We did find mini cheese, tomato and garlic pizza's that conveniently were meant to be cooked in a toaster! How lucky is that.

After a pleasant night sleep and being told buy the manager we were crazy for leaving so early as we were only young and should still be in bed, we set off to do a little bit of exploring before we had to catch our coach which departs Florence at 8am.
So as you can tell we didn't have time to explore much of Florence but what we did see was beautiful. We both agreed that some day in the future we would like to go back to Florence and fully explore. That was our very short trip to Florence, our next stop is another short one but this time we jump the boarder for the first time in a while and head over to France.

Nice here we come!