2024-10-16
(Day 12 of #100DaysToOffload)
It is Wednesday, and the weather is... far more foul now. The skies were lovely and blue until today, when they are fully overcast. The top of Asinelli tower is covered in fog. I am going to catch a train today to go to Florence; it is not the best day, and really I should have gone earlier. Hey ho.
I... have lost some hope in Italian trains. I was hoping, because c2c (owned by Trenitalia) is fairly good in the UK, I thought the trains would be very good here, especially it being Europe. However, they weren't as good as I thought. To be fair, the fact that the train travels at 250km/h and barely rocks at all is lovely. The problem is, a direct ticket from Bologna to Florence was EUR33! So I paid 66 euros for a day trip to Florence. Whoa.
Also, the train station at Bologna Centrale is incredibly confusing. There were some Italian women there that were also confused, and were following a train driver to the right platform, so I just followed them (they were also going to Florence).
Florence is really quite nice. It is a lot less busy than Bologna. I feel almost as if Florence is like London, where Bologna is instead like, say, Cambridge or somewhere like that. In that, Florence is less busy (or rather, has less footfall - though that may have just been the weather), has less food places and more shops, more foreigners about (e.g. holidaymakers), etc. I think as a city it is somewhat prettier; that said, I would probably rather live in Bologna.
I visited the Palazzo Vecchio (which was lovely), and walked about the city getting very lost. I think I will need to come back another time to Florence specifically, to visit all the sights, where I will book to see David, the Uffizi, that sort of thing.
My shoes were soaked through when I got back; it's very wet today. I think it will be similar for the rest of the days... Fun.
Tomorrow, I'll probably spend a decent bit of time in the hotel, and also I want to actually peruse the bookshops and see if I can get some nice books (in Italian, of course). I'm about 2/3 of the way through Jane Eyre that I've been reading.