Let's Go Somewhere-9/2/2014 Florence, London, Sienna

John Says:

I think one makes a Faustian pact when they receive adequate employment.  I’m a firm believer that human beings weren’t cut out for work.  Well, some of us weren’t.  Sadly I do see a lot of automatons on a daily basis who seem perfectly happy to hope on a bus, train, drive a car with their giant Dunkin’ in hand, ready to kill another eight hours for God and country.  But this isn’t a blog post about jobs.

I always wanted to travel.  But I didn’t really have the money until around 2009 when I was nearly two years deep in what many would describe as adequate employment.  I wondered if I missed the boat being unable to travel in my 20s and into my early 30s.  After all, I was becoming quite content to kill evenings and weekends sitting on the couch with drink in hand, or in a bar, pontificating about the sad madness that made up these United States.  Fortunately for me I married someone who realized that slaving away for eight hours a day was worth more than coming home and complaining about it while getting relatively drunk.  So thanks to her I’ve been able to go some places.

like here:

and here:

One place that really stuck out in my mind, not in a good way, was the city of Florence.  Firenze to most everyone else.  It wasn’t Florence’s fault that I didn’t gel with the city.  The weather was hot.  I sit here now writing this on what’s going to be a 92 degree day in SEPTEMBER.  But the four or five days that the wife and I were in Florence, man, it was hot.  94 or 95 degrees daily.  I’m not a summer person when it’s mild.  So my first inclination was to hide in the hotel or in the heavily air-conditioned Irish Bar that we found.  But had I done that I wouldn’t have been able to see this.:

or this:

That’s not the real David glaring toward Rome.  The real one is located in Florence’s Galleria dell’Accademia.  This one is a replica that stands in the Palazzo della Signoria.  But I did see the real one.  And to be honest, it’s one of the most amazing experiences that I’ve had in traveling.  I’m pretty big on art and living in NYC, if I have the dough, I can stand in front of van Gogh’s Starry Night six days a week.  I’ve managed to see some great works while traveling.  van’ s Sunflowers, Picasso’s Guernica, Velasquez’s and Caravaggio’s up the ass.  I stood in an all-black room gazing at Klimt’s The Kiss.  But none of them rivaled the majesty of standing in front of Michelangelo’s David.

In an effort to be brief there were a lot of great sites to see in Florence such as the Duomo, Campanile, and the Uffizi Gallery.  Day trips to Pisa and Sienna are worth it…if it’s not 100 degrees outside.  My trip was also marred by the vast amount of Americans in Florence.  I was there during the MTV reign of The Jersey Shore, and apparently they filmed a season of it in Florence a year or so before.  This may explain the number of Americans walking around wearing David boxer shorts over their jeans, or why at random moments chants of USA! USA! broke out on the streets.  Or why some thousands of miles from home I’d turn a corner in Florence and run into something akin to this: