Surprise! (Una sorpresa)

For stories of Pisa and preceding that, more of Florence click here.

Continued...

I hear a noise at the door. We had put the key of the room in the keyhole so that we would not be caught unaware if someone entered our room. Since I was out of my REM cycle I decided to greet the door meddlers (assuming that they were the guests of the room). I opened the door to find two men. My first thought was that they were here to kick us out of the room maybe because it had an odd checkout time (it was rather cheap to get rooms here, there had to be a catch right?). I was wrong. The Italian guys told me that they were assigned our room. I told them that two women were supposed to come since this was an all-girls dorm room. They said that the front desk that given them an already booked room and when they tried to open the door, their key broke. After some arguing and waiting, they were assigned our room. I felt sad for them since they clearly drew the short straw of this hostel while we had the long straw till now. Since we were leaving a bit earlier today, I let them in to lay their head on the bunks above our beds. That was when I noticed the time. It was 6 AM, I recalled that they had mentioned that they had come to the hostel at 7 PM the night before and was glad that they could rest for some time at least.

Just as they were almost asleep (I heard their snores), my alarm was about to go off (I could not go back to sleep, we are women after all). I went to check on my friend and as expected, she could not sleep for that half hour either. We got ready as quietly as possible without putting the light on and left the two boys in peace.

We gave the key back at the reception and the lady told us that we had to pay 5 euros. When I asked her why, she said that we broke a key. I looked at her and glanced towards the key we gave her. She was clearly unsure of how a broken key could be as good as new. We left her in her confusion since we were late for our bus.

Our day did not start off the best and of course, we missed our bus. The streets were quiet at this time. We tried to get a ride from the passersby in cars, just to see the look on their faces. We did not get a positive response or decelerating car.  We gave up for a momemnt and sat at the bus stop. We were by ourselves until we spotted an Audi TT stop at a nearby unopened newspaper shop and unlock it. We were wondering how he was able to sustain himself and get such a nice car on the newspapers he sold. We concluded that he did this as a hobby. It was at this time that I was suddenly starving and with all the usual shops around here closed, I walked to the Audi owner and glanced about his shop for anything to eat. He said that he only had paper, and since I am not a goat, unfortunately I had to forget about food for now.

We met another kind stranger who told us that there was another bus stop nearby that would take us to the city sooner than if we waited for our next bus. She was from Sri Lanka and had been living here for 15 years. I love the diversity of the cities in our large global world.

Every first sunday of the month, the cities in Italy open their prized museums and monuments to the public without any entrace fees. The Uffizi is well known for its art and history in Italy and was our destination this morning. However, we met a 200 people long line when we got there. We decided to head first to the festivies around the Duomo (Easter celebrations are elaborate here). We were met with pleasant and friendly policemen and policewomen who told us what would happen here.

The parade to the Duomo through the city for Easter

I assume that these are the various houses (like in Game of Thrones) respresented

The priests

These drummers kept the whole parade in time

Finally women!

I have read that people who participate in these parades have been doing so for years

Which means that they probably know the routines too well

So it was refreshing to see something different when one guy missed his flag (no offense to you!)

They even set off many firecrackers into the morning sky (which we couldn't see because of the bright sun). An interesting experience nonetheless. We found the Leonardo da Vinci museum and ventured in to find very informative books about Florence and Italy as well as the genius that is Leonardo da Vinci of course. After spending some time there reading and exploring pop-up books about his inventions (I really wanted it!), we left to find the famous 1950s American Diner.

Honestly, I felt like we stepped into another world. The waitresses were in skates, the tiles were black and white and the seats were red leather. The only glitch in this world was that the waitresses spoke Italian (and English of course). We ordered only 2 California burgers since we were not very hungry. We were wrong about the portions though. The overwhelming portion size made me think about eating this over the course of a few days.

Welcome to the America of the 1950s

They enjoyed skating through the diner

That took ages to finish!! 

I wonder if Americans really eat food this size. I am not sure if our taste buds have changed but we did not like the food much, it felt very tasteless. It was screaming, "I am all about the quantity, not the quality". We even overheard an American lady passing the diner say to her daughter "Scary isn't it?" (about the diner). And I was sold. America was not truly like this, this was a 1950s dream. We left as soon as possible to cleanse our palettes and return to Italy from America. We found Robiglio to save our taste buds. We relaxed in the back (they have a lot of space for self service) and ordered a mignon  (a tiny tart) each to Italianize our tongues again. We then sat there for a few hours reading our books.

We had left our luggage this morning in a storage locker at the train station (6 EUR for the first 5 hours and then 1 EUR for every consequent hour) and took our bag just in time to save one Euro. Our bus was waiting for us when we arrived and it was the very same driver that brought us to Florence. We hoped that he was not very angry this time around. But, he had not changed over the weekend (maybe he didn't want to work over the holidays?). He did not recongise us and we had a quiet journey back to Trento. I wanted to be nice to him when we reached Trento and thus wished the driver a "Buona Pasqua" (Happy Easter), but I was ignored...

Oh well, that was our journey to the land of art and dreams. We enjoyed ourselves and practiced our Italian which was fun. Until my next trip, Arrivederci and thank you for reading!

<If you want to start from the beginning of this particular trip, click here.>