Athens

We arrived here in Athens a few hours ago after what we agreed was the scariest plane ride of our lives. This was due to the incredibly gusty winds combined with our little tiny plane. Reminiscent of the WildMaus rollercoaster at Oktoberfest. You know it's bad when everyone on board starts laughing and clapping loudly when the plane finally touched down, after ten minutes of complete silence when everyone was contemplating what their last words should be. Terrifying and we've never been happier to step inside an airport.

At the moment we're in some cafe and are waiting for a more acceptable time to eat. It seems that Greeks do not eat dinner until around 10pm. Tomorrow we're setting off for our cruise and hopefully will have time to do a little self-guided tour before we leave.

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Quite a busy few days! Yesterday morning we went to the Accademia and (finally!) saw the David and the Slaves. Absolutely even more breathtaking than we even expected, and we had pretty high expectations. We also went to San Marco and saw all of the Fra Angelico frescoes, including Marisa's favorite version of the Annunciation. That was all a wonderful start to the day. Then we had to pack up and leave Florence, which was sad. Such a magical city. We said goodbye to our charming (if slightly manic) hostel guy, Fernando - who also ran Chicago and Boston but the opposite years we did! Did we mention that already? - and took a bus to San Gimignano.

There's not a whole lot to do in the village of San Gimignano besides climb the towers for spectacular views, which we did. Then we sat on the church steps in the square and people-watched for an hour. Saw an adorably funny gathering of old men and women who all congregate on the square (bringing their own folding chairs) at dusk and sit there for a few hours, probably every night. Men in one row, women in another. What do they talk about every day?? We liked the town very much and stayed with a lovely old woman who spoke no English. Not sure whether we liked it better than Rothenburg in Germany, they are very similar.

This morning we got up early and took a bus to Siena where we spent an hour walking around with our 40lb packs looking for the train station. Ended up taking a bus. We did get to visit il Campo, where they have the famous horse race the Paleo, and that was something we had wanted to see so that was fun. Siena is beautiful, wish we'd had more time there.

We are now back in Roma for just one night and tomorrow morning we fly to Athens! Very excited for the cruise!!

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Firenze

Lovely day today in Florence. We had a 10:45 reservation at the Uffizi Gallery this morning and spent a few fun hours there: Michelangelo's Doni Tondo, Botticelli's Birth of Venus (interestingly, a misnomer since it actually portrays her landing at Cypres) and Primavera, da Vinci's Adoration of the Magi and Annunciation.... Wonderful things. Like walking around in an absorbing art textbook for three hours, but probably more fun.

We had a bit of an altercation with the audioguide-seller woman at the entrance because the denied us the rental of an audioguide. We NEEDED the audioguide - we are huge audioguide people. But apparently at the Uffizi you must have either a drivers license or passport to rent the veverable audioguide. A credit card with your photo on it is "not possible." We begged. We pleaded. We offered other valuables in the passport's stead. (We didn't have our passports on us, erroneously believing we would have no need of them since we were only going to the Uffizi and not to another country. Apparently the prestigious Uffizi holds its audioguide renters to the same gold standard as international border control). If the purpose of this deposit item is to ensure that you will return the audioguide machine and not run away with it, we realized afterwards that we should have offered to leave our shoes with the woman. Obviously we couldn't leave the museum without shoes. We ended up buying a guidebook instead.

We also visited the Basilico San Lorenzo in the afternoon. Tonight was our one dinner out of the week and we thoroughly enjoyed it at La Giostra (thank you Aunt Linda and Uncle Bob for the recommendation!!) It was beautiful and the food was delicious and we got free champagne and a free bottle of limoncello as a "digestive." We spent over three hours there and had such a great night. Though we're quite sure it was also our most expensive dinner out ever - but well worth it!


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Small setback

Tonight we encountered the first legitimately negative part of our trip so far. We were trying to upload our photos to the internet and, to make a long story short, seem to have deleted about 390 of our 430 pictures. The only ones remaining are from the past few days. We are most upset about losing our Oktoberfest pictures... those are the hardest to replace.

On one bright side, we still have four months of pictures yet to be taken.

On another bright side, a couple of Munich pictures and the remaining Tuscany ones are up at http://edandmarisa.shutterfly.com

If anyone has photos of Munich, Schnepfendorf, Fuessen, Rothenburg, Salzburg, Venice, Verona, Bologna, Rome, or the Cinque Terre that you would like to donate to our future album, we would sincerely appreciate it.

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