Hey all our readers;
Thank you for keeping all your messages (short) - we appreciate it.
Today we left the hotel at 8:30 to catch our train at the station at 10. After a three hour trip in which we saw numerous cloud covered mountains and very green paddocks. We arrived in Florence and felt much safer in the smaller quieter town. The population of Florence is 380,000, it has around 140 churches, fifty museums and one public toilet. Ethan directed us to the hotel, it didn't take us long even though we did miss the turn and went around in a circle. We ended up asking a wealthy local for directions who wanted 5 euros for the directions. After a few days of not being able to do our washing we found a laundromat and finally got to do our washing (it was about time to). We meet our guide, Franchesca at the hotel at 4 o'clock and she took us on a tour of Florence. We started with the 3rd biggest basilica in the world: Santa Maria. This basilica was very grand, it was made of marble sourced from different parts of Italy and it was 110 meters tall.
We then went to the museum Academia and saw the famous statue of David. David was 17 feet tall, made out of marble and Mrs Stroud was very taken by his form. Franchessca then took us through Florence to see the mascot of Florence: a bronze boar/pig. We rubbed its snout for good luck and to make us come back to Florence.
We then had dinner which was paid for by the Blakney Millar foundation which we greatly appreciated and sung Happy Birthday to Amelia. We told Amelia that she had to kiss the neared man - luckily/unfortunatley that happened to be Mr Deitz - we had a good laugh :)
By Stacey and Chris
P.S. to J Hayes - txt msg received.