About Gustis, Metros and Euros - III

Day 3: Florence/Firenze, Italy:

We were scheduled to travel to Florence today morning at around 10:30am. Since this was our first trip between cities in a train, we were extra cautious, waking up by 6am and getting set by 8am. Our prudent mindset got us to Termini by 9:30am as we were accounting for traffic jams, crowd and long lines. At Termini, there was no signs announcing the arrival of our train. It was not until 10:05am did they announce the platform where our train would depart from. Nevertheless, we, the anxious couple were waiting all this while, our eyes fixed on the announcement board. After the announcement was made, we made our way to the train through crowds of anxious tourists to board our train to Florence. One more thing to note is that trains are announced with their final destination in mind. The train we were taking was supposedly going to Milan Centrale via Florence. The wise thing would be to board a train based on the time and not based on the destination displayed. All coaches are marked with a number on the body of the compartment, this indicates the class. The coach number is a separate number that is generally indicated on a display panel on the compartment. My research made me easy to navigate to the appropriate 1st class compartment. If you have reserved seats, the seat numbers reset at each coach i.e. there are a number of seat 60s, one in each coach. We found our seats with ease and hoisted our heavy bags in the overhead bins. The bins are pretty narrow and for sometime I was a little paranoid that the heavy luggage would fall on my head (given my experience with Indian trains). Nothing untoward happened though. The seats are extremely comfortable and you have tables in front of you that can be used to fiddle with your notebooks or play a board game. The train finally departed Roma Termini towards Florence.

The distance between Rome and Florence is around 250km and the "Alta Velocita" Eurostar train takes just over 1.5 hours. Drinks are served free of cost in the 1st class compartment. Oranges in Italy are more red than orange and the orange juice we requested was the same. The steward provides everyone with a pack of freshening towels too. The experience is n-fold better than travelling on an American airliner. The ticket collector stopped by and asked our passes. We had our passes, but we had not entered the date on the pass. Keep in mind that whenever you have a Eurail pass, please enter the date before you use the pass for the first time on that day. Also, the Eurail pass is a different piece of paper than the paper coupon given to you with your seat numbers. We were not aware of this and the ticket collector threatened to levy a fine on us of 50 euros. I tried to explain to him that it was a genuine mistake, trying to act dumb and extremely apologetic. But he could not comprehend my English and for a moment I was thinking of a plethora of possibilities that could befall us. He may put us in jail, throw us out of the train moving at 100kmph, drop us off at the next station which would be a village in central Italy etc. But somehow, perhaps he could see the fear in my eyes, he gave me a warning and let me go. A fellow traveller (an Indian) then came up to me and told me that he and his family had faced a similar situation when they visited Italy the first time. It took some time for me to get over it, but pretty soon I was fine, playing hangman with my wife, as I had vented all my embarrassment by winning over her.

The journey between Rome and Florence takes you over grassy plains and long tunnels. Your ears pop in and out as you move at great speeds through these tunnels. When we were near Florence, we got our bags down and marched towards the door. Apparently, trains stop at stations for less than 5 mins and the Indian family who were travelling with us (a couple and a kid) take 2.5 minutes to alight. It seemed like they had practiced this routine to perfection. The station at Florence, the Santa Maria Novella station, is a pretty archaic station and a little smaller than the one at Rome. I had no clue how to get from the station to our hotel and was looking for maps of the place. The tourist information center had a long line and for 1 Euro they gave me a map of the city. I knew that our hotel was along the river Arno and after a few minutes I could locate the street where we would need to go. The cities in Italy are pretty small and we thought we could manage going to the hotel by dragging our heavy bags along the way. It was tough, but manageable. It took us a whole hour to navigate through the narrow crowded streets. We were pretty disciplined in being alert with our bags and belongings. I had heard that Italy was not as safe as the US.

Florence is a quaint town with narrow streets. I have hardly seen automobiles there other than buses that are used as means of public transport. As we wound our way through the streets, we couldn't find street names to navigate. As in Rome, the street names are not on sign boards but on buildings themselves. Once that was discovered, navigating the streets became very easy. An old woman and an young man were very enthusiastic in guiding us at one point when we were stuck in a square and didn't know where to go. Once we were on the bank of the Arno it was easy to find our hotel, Hotel Balestri. Hotel Balestri is located next to the Arno with the bathroom window facing the river. Our room was not spacious (same as in Rome), but was very bright and it had a balcony as well. My wife adores the hotel room very much. That afternoon we walked up to the Accademia to view Michelangelo's David which is housed in this museum. There are a number of other paintings and sculptures. We also visited the music museum that gave us a white-box view of a piano. For some reason, I was under the misconception that a piano was an air instrument. But this was dispelled when I saw how a piano works at the Accademia.

Michelangelo's David is a true master piece, a larger than life statue of David with his sling after annihilating Goliath. When we went to the Accademia, I saw people sketching the statue, discussing its intricacies, describing its features or silently admiring it. Such is the charisma behind this piece of art. To enter the Accademia you have to shell out 6.5 euros a person and you get to visit, David, the gallery of statues, the gallery of paintings and the music museum.

After filling our minds with David's perfection, we wanted to fill our growling stomachs. I had identified a vegetarian restaurant on the Internet near Bordo Croce before starting on our journey. We walked down to that place only to find that the restaurant had closed down some years back. The owner of the hardware store that has come up next to this place directed us to an "Indian" place on the same street. We went there to find that most of the food was over. But the person there told us that he would cook rice for us and make vegetarian biriyani at 3 euros a plate. After 10 mins, we were served hot biriyani that tasted pretty good. This eat-out is run by 3 brothers from Lahore, Pakistan who have been in Florence for 9, 5 and 3 years respectively starting from the eldest. After wishing them good bye, we walked back to the hotel, admiring the street artists and the chalk sketchers on the way. The chalk art is brilliant and is done in 4-5 hours time.

In the evening we took a walk across the Arno to Piazza Michelangelo, that houses a replica of the David. This Piazza, a very beautiful and romantic place overlooks the city of Florence on one side and the countryside on the other. The Piazza is up a hill with a fleet of stairs and is around 15 minutes walk from the Balestri. We came across a cat shelter on the way and my love for felines forced me to take some pictures there. Later that night we took a walk along the bank of the Arno and the scene was stunning with lamp posts dotting the banks of the river. The romance of Florence was captivating us as the seconds passed. A truly beautiful city.

Day 4: Florence/Firenze and Pisa, Italy:

In places like Florence, credit cards are not widely accepted and my suggestion would be to take adequate cash with you. We woke up early in the morning on day 4 and went exploring the Vecchito Palazzo and the Uffizzi gallery. We didn't enter the gallery, but it houses many renowned paintings of the modern era. Instead, we went along the streets of Florence looking for supplies. Florence, like Rome, has stone paved streets and stone buildings. The buildings are archaic looking, except that they are not brick-colored. We bought water at 60 cents a bottle at a grocery store and batteries at 4 euros for a 8 battery pack at a camera shop.

We were scheduled to leave for an excursion to Pisa in the afternoon and had to go near Piazza Della Stazione (the circle near the station) to catch our bus to Pisa. It started raining a bit there and we had not accounted for rain in Europe in our checklist. We didn't have an umbrella and we bought one from a vendor selling them on a street corner. He was demanding 6 Euros and we bargained it for 3.8 Euros, ah, what a good deal. But a gust of wind tore a piece of the umbrella and a few meters down the lane we found a shop selling umbrellas for 3 Euros. So much for our street smartness and bargaining abilities. We reached the station and went a little further to a fort near the station, Fort Basse. The guard there thought that we were there for a medical conference only to realize that we didn't look like doctors from any angle of his imagination. He sent us out and told us to go around the fort to view the gardens and the fountain that form the facade of the fort. At around 3pm, we boarded a bus to Pisa, an hours drive from Florence across the province of Tuscany, known for its olive oil. On the way, the tour guide pointed us to nurseries specializing in ornamental plants, the largest chinese community in Europe and a host of towns that marked the landscape.

We arrived at Pisa under gloomy skies and were taken into the square at Pisa that hosts a cathedral, a baptistery and the famous leaning tower. Only limited tickets are sold per day to go on top of the leaning tower and naturally we were late. The leaning tower is 55 meters tall and from the 4th storey onwards an architect tried to correct the tilt by building pillars perpendicular to the plane of the ground. The cathedral nearby is built in Romanesque style peppered with a lot of Islamic arches. The tour guide showed us the chandelier that Galileo had observed to come up with the concept of a simple pendulum within the cathedral. The cathedral was built from the riches of an Arab ship that was looted by the Italians. Pisa is a very small place and not very impressive. On a lighter note, the tour guide was telling us that public restrooms were the cheapest in Pisa at 30 cents a person when compared to 1 euro in Florence and 1.5 euros in Venice.

We got back to Florence by 7pm and took another walk along the banks of the Arno. We had identified a Mediterranean restaurant the previous day and had dinner there. It turned out to be managed by an Indian. We had some good biriyani and Pizza Margharita (Pizza with tomato sauce and cheese, our staple diet at most places during our trip). We were the only people in the restaurant and he had a good chat with us. During dinner, it was pouring outside and once we were done, the rain had stopped and we walked back to our hotel. We were scheduled to leave Florence the next day to Venice, but the captivating charisma of the city was giving us the Stockholm's syndrome and we were very reluctant to depart.

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