Hi All,
Fairly short blog today as most of the day was spent travelling from Rome to Florence or from Florence to Venice.
Anyway, we had a relatively late start again today, can't seem to put my finger on why, but it may have had something to do with the beer and wine consumption, we did manage to rise at around 8:30am anyway and after breakfast, checkout and walking back to where the car was parked we were on our way by about 10:00am, back on the highways, watching the locals refuse to drive within the lanes, we had a short stop for lunch bewteen Rome and Florence and arrived on the outskirts of florance around 1:00pm. We parked the car paid for parking and walked to the bus stop. We managed to have a conversation with a local to figure out which bus to catch and jumped on. The driver wasn't intereested in taking any money and neither was the ticketing machine, it would seem that you should purchase a ticket before you get on the bus, andvalidate the ticket once on the bus, only about 10% of the people who got on the bust did anything about validating a ticket, and the driver didn't seem to care whether you had a ticket or not, so I'm assuming that it's a random check that happens once in a while and it didn't happen on our way into Florence so it was all good.
we got off the bus about a block from the accademia (where David is standing) and wandered down there. Once there we found 2 CLEARLY marked lines (it will become clear why that's important later), one for the people who had booked a time, and one for the people like us who had just shown up. We could tell from the length of the line that we were in for a long wait, but we wanted to see David so we went to the end of the line and waited. I was estimating about 1.5 hours worth of waiting, but after about an hour we were at the front of the line, it was at this point that the Americans started to appear, each one(or group) and there were multiple, showeed up at the front of the line and asked the Italian guard where the line was and how long they'd have to wait, the couple in front of us spoke a little english so they tried to help out, but in between Americans we managed to expose ourselves so it bacame our job! much to my disgust we had to explain the whole thing to each of the STUPID Americans that showed up, as I mentioned earlier the two lines were clearly marked in english, so much so that Carol and I, who aren't particularly seasoned travellers managed to read the signs and walk to the back of the line without having to push in between the people standing in line and ask dumb questions.
Before being identified as english speakers who understood what was going on because we could read, we even watched one american put on disgusted look when the Italian guard managed to convey to them that he didn't speak english, I could only stand back in awe and imagine the same person if an Italian dared to approach them in their home town and speak to them in Italian, asking for directions, I can only imagine how they'd react if the roles were reversed!!!
Anyway, after surviving the onslaught of people who couldn't read, we entered the Acadamia, the art was amazing(sorry no photo's allowed, so the photo I took from outside 2 days ago is the best we've got), but rest assured that it's worth standing in line and even worth dealing with the stupid people!! David is a massive figure, and funnily enough, even though apparently his proportions are very accurate, I would think his hands and feet are a bit too big for the rest of him, but what would I know!!!
Once we'd wandered around the museum for a couple of hours we headed back to the car, and as we still didn't know how to get a bus ticket we walked, only took about 40 minutes and was pleasant enough even though it was sprinkling rain.
Back in the car and a roughly 3 hour trip to Venice, pretty much without incident apart from the usual can't possibly drive in my lane and my own issues with understanding the speed limits......
Got to Venice and parked the car, was asked the leave the keys in it by a young man in a white shirt who looked official anyway, hopefully we'll still have a car when we leave Venice!!
Hotel was easy enough to find, I'll give you the run down on Florence after dinner, it's been a good day and we've enjoyed ourselves again.
Hope this finds everyone well, talk to you all soon, Richard and Carol
A Couple of Photo's from Florence - sorry none from inside the Academia
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