The usual author is back for tonight, but don't worry - you will see the guest writer again thanks to the outcry of public support.
We took a vacation from our vacation today (for the most part), and had a mostly non-tourist day. We slept in a little and then went for a run. The rest of our morning involved laundry. The apartment has a washing machine for us to use which makes our lives somewhat easier. [Possibly interesting note: the washers here have all the temperatures in Celsius, which requires us to do some math before starting a load. While this in itself is not interesting, you might be interested to know that temperature options range from 30 degrees to 90 degrees Celsius. We always choose the coolest option - but I want to know who washes their clothes at 90 degrees Celsius - around 200 degrees Farenheit!]
As is often the case, the washer in our apartment does not have a dryer to go along with it. Since our apartment is too cool for anything to dry, we searched for a self-service laundromat while we were running this morning. Mike found a small franchise that claimed to have a location near our house, so we went to check it out before lugging all our wet clothes with us. We ended up finding something closer, but before going home we stopped at another one of the booths for the conference going on here. We found a booth that was giving away food samples, but we had to fill out a short questionnaire first: they claimed that based on our answers we would get a sample suited to our taste preferences. The test was more about whether I could translate the questions for Mike. We worked through most of the questions, got our sampler plates, and enjoyed a tiny sandwich and some thin strips of mystery meat. We still don't know what we ate, but it was pretty good.After our snack, Mike carried the suspicious-looking sack of wet clothes (Mike claimed it must have weighed 50 pounds) and we finished up the laundry with an industrial-sized dryer.
With clean clothes back at home, we set off to find some lunch in the Oltrano area. I just finished reading a murder mystery that takes place in Florence (Mike is reading it now), and its exciting to know of and visit the places that the author talks about. The piazza where we had lunch today is where one of the murders in the book takes place (this is not a great example, I know).
After lunch we did our only touristy thing of the day. We went to visit the Dante Museum (at the site of his house). It wasn't the best museum we've been to - either the curator took 150 details that somehow relate to Dante and put them in random order throughout the museum, or we don't know enough about Dante to connect all the dots. Nonetheless, it was interesting to see some maps of Florence, Italy, and Europe as they looked in Dante's time, learn a little about the guilds that were so powerful in his time, and to watch a video of someone making a ring with Dante's family shield on it.For the rest of the afternoon we just walked around the city, doing what seems like the most popular pastime: window shopping (this is a close second to actual shopping - its hard to believe how many people shop here - and buy expensive things! There were so many people in Tiffany's this afternoon it didn't look like any more people could fit in the store). We did find a store that sold violet flavored candy (but not gelato), so we got some to snack on. And we've been looking for the past week for some face soap. This may seem like a menial task, but we cannot find it anywhere! Supermarkets for some reason sell toothpaste, shampoo, etc. - but not face soap. And pharmacies seem too only sell fancy over-the-counter products. The search continues...
Speaking of searches, we are also looking for a missing gorilla:
We made a quick stop at the supermarket for dinner supplies and called it a day. We'll be back on the tourist routine tomorrow.
Gelato Gusti per il Giorno:
Mike - Cioccolato Amarena e Mandorla
Aviva - Sesame (really good!)
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