La Vie en France: Florence, Siena and Pisa

CIAO! My roommate and I had a February vacation for 2 weeks at the beginning of February. The vacation is usually meant for skiing but we decided to head south and crossed our fingers for some warmer weather! I'm over the snow. We started off spending 4 nights in Florence. I had been there just once before, with my sister on a cruise. We only spent one day there and I have always said that I need to go back. The city is so beautiful! Definitely one of my favorite places I've ever been. We had a lot of time there so we just took our time doing everything. We went to the museums, saw the statue of David, saw the famous "Birth of Venus" painting,

climbed to Michelangelo square for a view of the city, and of course, ate LOTS of goooood food. So amazing! The food in Italy is to die for, and to make it much better, it's way cheaper than in France. You can get a good 3 course meal for like $15. That would never, ever happen in Franc

e. It also made me feel more at home having all my Italian comfort food! Almost the same as a night at the Fisco's. Luckily I haven't gained any weight since all we do is walk all day! I should have worn a pedometer.

From Florence we decided to take one day trip, to a town called Siena. There isn't much to do there, it's just a pretty place to go and see. We left early in the morning, found a cheap bus to get there, and spent about 6 hours in the city. The church there was gorgeous, and we also climbed up the tower to see the whole city. It looked really cool from up above because all of the roofs are orange, and it kind of looks like all the houses are stacked on top of each other. We lucked out on our timing on this trip, because as soon as we climbed down from the tower, a huge rain/sleet/snow storm started up. It was awful! Italy is definitely not prepared for snow, and neither were we. So much for going to Italy to escape the cold weather. All the brick roads are so slippery, we were falling all over the place. We headed

back to our bus stop right away. Luckily there was a bus there waiting for us, otherwise we couldn't have taken much more. Our shoes were soaked all the way through to our socks! Lucky for us the storm didn't last too long, and by the time we got back to Florence the snow was gone :)

The next stop on our trip was a place called Cinque Terre, on the east side of Italy on the sea. We were checking out the trains to get there, and we discovered that we had to stop in Pisa on the way for our layover. I never had much of an interest in going to the town, but I figured since we were there we might as well get our picture of holding up the tower. We stayed for 2 hours, ate some pizza, got our pics and were on our way.

More to come on Cinque Terre!

Florence from Michelangelo square