Day 2: Piede é piede é piede...

After a good night's sleep (we thought we beat jet lag but...more on that next post) we woke up and were excited to hit the town.  The day's agenda was based simply off of finding some necessities.  On a national holidy in Italy, of course ;)  The goal was to find a supermarket rumored to be just up the street.  One of the interesting things about Italy is that there is not a supermarket as we know them on every corner.  There are little markets all around town but they typically specialise in either veggies or fruit or meat or bread and such.  There are a few slightly bigger markets that have a mixed selection of a few of these things but not really pharmacy needs.  You have to go to a seprate farmacia to get things like allergy medicine, body lotion, vitamins and all.  While I can certainly appreciate they way they operate, I still missed having my mega-mart where I can buy anything I could possibly want/need in one store.  However, not having that luxury led us on a wonderful sightseeing tour of Florence!

First thing in the morning we found a cute little caffe on the back streets near our apartment.  Not much English spoken here so we knew it was going to be good!  The cappuchino...TO DIE FOR!!!  Then off to the market...or so we thought.  Essentially we zigged and we zagged and kept trying to find Wifi to look on a map, which is fairly useless.  Along the way we barely found what we needed but we bought me an Italian leather jacket, an authentic, for real print of a painting someone completely not famous did...which is a story in itself.  The guy selling them was a street vendor and I made the mistake of saying "Oooh, pretty" and it was on.  50 euros - no thank you.  2 for 80 - no thank you.  First one 40/second one 35 - no thanks.  2 for 60 - no, really.  Ok, you are special (rolls up two and puts into our bag with the leather jacket.  I'll let you just have them.  For 35 - no, no, no, thank you though.  1 for 15 - oh for christ's sake fine.  SOLD!!!  And I'm pretty sure I left out a few negotiations.  Those guys are talented though, could make a fortune selling something of real value.

Let's see, what else...we found an awesome square with gigantic arches and a carousel that had a very cool bookstore where Dan scored some sweet graphic novels!  Then we were sure we were onto an actual supermarket but no.  However we did reach a mega highway and then had to go back through a seedy side of town where we found another cute little place to eat lunch.  A salad with super soft yummy cheese, tomatos, olives and cucumber and a plate of  bruschetta with fantastic white beans and tomatoes.  Then we ran into Dante and boy did he look pissed.

I accidently peeked into a military zone hatch and then found the sign saying what it was with a picture of a guy pointing a gun at you...hahahaha!  And then we found our way back to the Duomo where I managed to take a bunch of photos that turn out like shit becasue the settings on my camera were all wrong.  Go me.  Interesting fact, at the Duomo you can buy 16 different kinds of condoms from an outside vending machine.

We found ourselves back by the train station and we had realized the night before that we were about a block away from this gigantic fort the day before so we decided to check it out.  It was really pretty down there with a park and a pond and you could walk all around it on a path lined with big old green trees.  We wanted to go in but there was some special event going on with a long line.  If we could read Italian we would know what it was but, we don't.  We did however find some graffiti and poster art that was very cool today!  You don't need to know Italian to appreciate that.

More wandering and getting completely lost and we came across a restaurant where we had some delicious pizza, decent carbonara and some crappy wine that made me feel gross.  OH, and profiteroles.  Then home to bed where we both laid awake feeling like shit aaaallllllll night.  And of course we had to be up bright and early the next day for phase 2482 of our paperwork to get married....

I almost forgot, somewhere in there we had our mandatory gelato, well, I did.  Dark chocolate yum.  Dan had a waffle slathered in messy, melty, drippy Nutella.  Are you salivating yet?  Also, you should note that for the first day's gelato I had mango and Dan had mint chocolate chip with zuppa inglese.  Also, we did find a small grocery store where we knocked a few things off the list and we found a red pepper the size of Dan's head.
All photos from this day here http://flic.kr/s/aHsjzAaNzd