A Week to Go

We come home in a week. I guess that feels about right. There's always a tipping point on a trip where either you start mourning the end of the vacation or you're ready to be done with it and to go home. I'm not really feeling strongly either way this time. I'm pretty comfortable here, but it's always a little hard being foreign and it's very hot and the Italians have a different take on what air conditioned means. Americans, I think, associate it with being cool. Italians seem to interpret it as meaning a little bit less hot. I don't think I stopped sweating from noon until midnight yesterday and we were in several air conditioned places.

I think one could easily spend a year or more here though. We've only seen a fraction of what's here and it's already been a full trip. We still have a few more places to go- Verona, Padua and Venice. We leave Florence tomorrow.

Florence, when you see the pictures and the postcards, looks almost Disneyesque, which I don't consider a compliment. And all that stuff is there, but on the ground it's grey and graffitied and the streets are to0 narrow to appreciate how pretty some of the buildings are. Almost every place we pass was built between 300 and 600 years ago. It feels like an actual place, as opposed to feeling like you walked into a postcard. You can easily spend a week here and keep busy. It is loaded with tourists. Most people you see on the streets are holding maps. But even that seems okay, and if you like sculpture and gelato there are few finer places to be.