Firenze!

We've been in Florence for two days. Some highlights:
-Gus constantly talking about the "Dumomo" (Duomo).
-Our apartment. Top floor of a 16th century building (I wish I could say palazzo), which means lugging a 30 pound human up 4 flights of stairs. Other than that it's delightful, wood beamed ceilings (a little low for Darren, those Renaissance Florentines were short), a charming little kitchen with bright skylights and all the Italian television you can watch.
-Getting caught in the rain while Gus napped today. We simply had to run for cover and drink some chianti. Had a nice chat with our server about rain in Florence.
-drinking Chianti. daily.
-panini
-Espresso, as good as I'd hoped. Luckily, we have Cafe Calabria in Vancouver so I won't have to go without entirely when I get back.

Michaelangelo's David was quite impressive. As we were walking behind the David statue Gus said "ooh, he's got a big butt." which made some American women chuckle.

The city itself is beautiful, astonishingly clean and very friendly. I'm pathetically scrambling to speak Italian since I missed my all day Italian for travellers because of pink eye! I've empolyed the Spanish/French with an Italian accent a couple times with success. Most people speak English so they are mostly just humouring me.

The flight was good, Gus was an angel and slept lots. The demon awoke at about 11pm on our first night here. We stayed in a hotel as it was too late to go into the apartment. And poor Gus, whose body told him it was early morning and time to get up was being told by tired mum and dad to go to bed. I'm sure the other guests thought we were doing something horrible because he screamed "NOoooooo" for about an hour. Of course Darren and I were exhausted, not getting any sleep on the flight. So we went to sleep while Gus watched blues clues on the dvd player for close to two hours.

ps, we forgot our laptop - in our living room, fortunately, and not the airport lounge in Amsterdam. So it's the frequesnt visit to the internet cafe....and we won't be uploading the photos as we'd planned.

off the Ufizzi Gallery in the morning. Gus is going to love that!