Italy - Sienna

We made a day trip out of Florence to Sienna. Its about 1.5 hrs south of Florence, in the heart of Chianti country.

The first thing we came across when getting off the bus was an impressive church. We decided to go inside and have a look. There we found the preserved head of Saint Catherine. It was floating in a jar and looked very shrunken. They also had her thumb, but we couldn't see that as it was so small. We thought that this was all quite in keeping with the strange behaviour of the Roman catholic church. Later on we saw many more reliquaries (bones of saints and religous artifacts) in the museum of the Sienna Duomo.

Sienna's duomo is much smaller than the one in Florence. But what it lacks in size it makes up for with the stripes in its marble. The blue painted ceilings (with painted golden stars) gave the church an amazing light.

The floors were very detailed inlaid marble, based on etchings done specifically for the building. Its amazing how much marble is used in the buildings of Italy. Entire churches, and public buildings are built from what seems to be solid marble.

We went to see the Duomo museum, which houses all the paintings, sculpture, and ornaments that have been taken out of the church over time. These included our favourite which was a marble sculpture of a sleeping child.

From the museum we could access the tower which gave us sweeping views across Sienna to the tuscan countryside.

We also went to see the Crypt, and the Baptistry.

The pizza in Sienna was something totally different to what we'd seen so far. The slices were bigger than you can imagine. It was also very tasty and simple in the tuscan style.

Italy - Florence

Rita in front of the Ponte Vecchio

Florence was our main destination for Italy. We had a total of 5 nights, which seems like a lot, but there is so much to do that it filled up really quick.

The main sights that we visited while there were; the Duomo (the domed cathedral), the Academia (art gallery), the Uffuzi (art gallery) and the Bobili gardens.

The Duomo dominates the Florentine cityscape. Standing at least twice as high as any building around it, you can see its terracotta tiled roof from all over Florence.

The dome has an amazing fresco (painted ceiling) which you can get very close to. We climbed up into the dome, and then up onto the top of the dome (463 steps, oh my god that's a long way). On the way up you can get within feet of the actual painting. The scale is fantastic, I have no idea how they managed to paint something of this size. The theme obviously is religion. Heaven and hell. We can understand why Christians are so scared of going to hell, some of the things happening in Hell look awful.

From the top of the dome you can see all over the city. The height is quite scary. I (Tim) got quite a bad case of vertigo up on the top, but the view was amazing.

The Academia is the home of Michelangelo's David. That's why people go there, and its worth every minute in the queue. We arrived at 7:15am (tickets open at 8:15), we were at the front of the queue and when we came out after seeing the David there was a queue all the way down the road and around the corner.
The statue of David is fantastic. Its hard to imagine how much better one piece of sculpture can be than every other. Wow.

We couldn't take pictures in there, so here is one we got off the net

The Uffuzi gallery has been open for 100's of years, and its home to some famous pieces of art. Most notably Botticelli's "Birth of Venus". The gallery was cool, with some very good pieces of art, but after so many galleries of religious art its hard to stay impressed.
They did have a cool exhibit of the engravings of Durher. His most famous work "Rhino" was by no means his best, but the detail in all the work is astounding.

We visited the Boboli gardens on our first day, and it was hot. The gardens were big and impressive. There was also a cool exhibit of period costumes. Some of it was really cool. Including some early Italian designers.

I think we did more sightseeing in Florence than in whole countries. It was pretty hectic, but worth it.

We also went to a cathedral that housed Michelangelo's tomb, visited many famous piazza's (squares), and did lots of walks, the best up to a church overlooking the whole city.

The tombs of Dante and Michelangelo

So onto the food ...
We ate pretty well in Florence. We've had lots of pizza, some pretty good pasta ( at our hostel that we cooked, and at restaurants), and loads of gelato. We've had Pistachio, Creme Caramel, Ricotta and Berry, Cassata, Tirimisu, Pinenut, Yogurt, Macadamia, Melon, Lemon, Fig, and Cheesecake. they were all really good. Mmmmmmmmmmm.

We had a set menu meal one night. We had good pasta with ragu sauce, then meat mains. the mains weren't fantastic, but the pasta was. The restaurant was really fun. Two old Italian guys came in playing accordion.

On our last night we went out for a restaurant meal and had cheeses, and Lasagna as starters, then for seconds Rita had Greek salad, and I had oven roasted stuffed rabbit.

We stayed in two different places, both were great. One especially, as it had internet in our room! but both were fantastic locations and our own room (we were getting tired of dorms).

The weather was amazing for the whole time while we were in Florence. Really, really hot. Florence is a cool city, totally packed with tourists, but has the most amazing array of sights to see.

Italy - Lucca

All cars in Italy are small, the old and the new

We stayed one night in Lucca, which is about an hour train ride from Florence, this was because it was easter Sunday, the accomodation in Florence was pretty booked out. We were so glad we did, Lucca was such a pretty town.

The train ride was lovely, seeing the beautiful Tuscan countryside along the poppy strewn train tracks. When we arrived it was totally dead, we don't know where everyone was, maybe in Church? The weather was gorgeous, totally sunny, hot, like a NZ summer, and its only early spring here! Our guesthouse was cool, in the lower level of a big house, kind of like a cellar area. We were just outside the old city walls. Lucca's old city, or the central city, is surrounded by really wide brick walls. On top of them are big walkways, trees, playgrounds etc, where we found in the afternoon are really popular with everyone for walking, biking etc. The city itself was really cute. Lots of Wysteria blooming, cobblestone streets, cafes, many squares...

We had the most delicious gelato and have been hooked since. We spent the whole afternoon and evening wandering around. Tasted yummy pizza, panini again, and had pasta for dinner. So glad we decided to stop there. Next day we caught the train to Florence.

Italy - Pisa

On the way to Italy we flew over the Swiss Alps

We flew into Pisa as that was the cheapest airport closish to Florence. We took a bus into town and went to see the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

Despite millions of tourists and souvenir stalls, it was actually a really cool sight to see. It is really quite tall and amazing that a building of that size can be on such a lean but still safe. You are still allowed to go up it, but for quite a price, and we were more than happy looking from below. It was funny the amount of people posing in front doing the classic perspective gag of pushing the tower over.

From what we had read there was not much else to see in Pisa, we just stopped by and then caught a train to Lucca. Before this though we got a margarita pizza and a rocket and salmi panini (they are quite different and way better than panini's you get in NZ). Very tasty.

England - London

So once again we found ourselves in London. The 9 hour bus trip down from Scotland was pretty painless, and we know our way around London now so its not scary.

We stayed with Kara (who we meant to get a photo of but forgot) which was great. We only had one full day in the city, and we spent it going to markets and catching up with people.

First of all we went to the Brixton market to see some cultral variety. There was loads of Caribbean fruit and vege, plus lots of other knock off consumer stuff. We bought some good cheap aubergine, and peppers, then headed off to the Borough market.

This is at the other end of the market spectrum. It was all organic handmade sheeps cheese, and wild boar sausage. There was samples of most things, so we tasted our way around the cheese, and brownie stalls. We bought some fantastic cherry tomatoes, and a stuffed chilli (very tasty).

We then caught up with Juliet (again no photo). We had coffee at a cool cafe in the Bricklane area, then sped back to Karas to make a big curry for dinner.

It was a pretty quick visit, as we had to leave Kara's place at 4:00 am to get to our plane to Italy.

Scotland - Glasgow

Glasgow was the only other place we went to in Scotland. We would have liked to see more, but you really need a car to get the most out of the area, and we didn't have either the time or the funds to rent one.

Glasgow's not as beautiful as Edinburgh is, and it seems a bit more depressed. We didn't really find it that interesting, and the hostel accomodation was TERRIBLE !!! (thats all I'm going to say about it).

Luckily the weather was fantastic while we were there. We spent the first day doing a bit of a walking tour (courtesy of Lonely Planet), and then read and hung out in the sun around the cathedral, and the necropolis.

Catherdral, and Necropolis.

In the afternoon we went to another park that was full of people having BBQ's and picnics. We sat in the sun, and read and ate a bit. The second day we did much the same. We went to a European market, and bought sausage, then went to the park to catch some rays.

Scotland - Edinburgh

Edinburgh is such a cool city. There are so many beautiful old buildings, lots of parks, and it is all really nicely laid out.

We had a little trouble checking into our hostel, they lost our booking (even though we had paid a deposit), also two others checking in at the same time had also had their booking 'lost'. The guy on reception was so drunk he didn't know what was going on and it took so long to sort out. But in the end we got a bed and the hostel turned out to be really good, and the drunk guy a really friendly and helpful guy, when sober, and it was in the best location, right in the middle of town.

We think Edinburgh is the one of the best cities we have been to. We really liked it, and if we come on a working holiday in the future it would be our number one choice of location (so far).

Edinburgh Castle

The main sight in Edinburgh is the castle, which is perched on top of a crag in the middle of the city. We spent a few hours looking around it, saw the Scottish Honours (crown jewels), prisons, royal apartments, lots of war memorials and museums, cannons, and battlements. It was really good but chilly. The castle has been invaded many times through history and you can see the different parts that have been rebuilt.

This cannon could fire one of these cannon balls 3km


Prisoners of war display, and one of the many castle gates

There are a lot of tourist shops in Edinburgh playing bagpipe music and selling tartan. We went to a great market and got french cheese and a baguette which we took over to a lovely park filled with daffodils and ate in the sun while listening to a band which was playing as part of a spring festival.

Giant sized food at the market

Really close to the city, right by the Scottish Parliament, is Holyrood Park, 260 hectares of what seemed to us like Scottish Highlands. It was so cool to have this right near the city. The highest peak is Arthurs Seat which we walked up to (250m high), a very steep walk that afforded amazing views.

We went to the cutest little tea shop for scones with jam and cream and rhubarb pie. They had a little tea trolley with all the different cakes and biscuit on. Yummy.

We spent quite a while over a couple of days in the Royal Museum of Scotland. We saw a very thorough exhibition on the history of Scotland, which after several hours we saw only half or less, so had to give up as we didn't have enough time. We went to a temporary exhibition on Pixar (makers of Toy Story, Monsters Inc. etc). It was really cool with a lot of the original artwork. We could have spent a lot longer at the museum, as it was we extended our time in Edinburgh from 3 to 4 nights as there was lots of things to do.

We bought an engagement ring from a store in Edinburgh. We are very happy with it, its exactly what we were looking for.

There are some great pubs in Edinburgh, here is a picture of one we went to.