and the journey continues..

met up with dasia at the hostel. long story. the short of it is that theresa and i spent, oh, around 5 hours in the train station waiting for her bus to arrive. unfortunately for both us and dasia, we had no way of communicating. her plane from the states to paris was delayed, hence she missed her connecting flight to florence. luckily, dasia remembered some of her french from high school and was able to do fairly well communicating to get a new flight. but of course, they booked her on the wrong flight. where you ask? to denmark. hahahah.

she got it straightened out, but still it wasn't until about 4 that she arrived in florence, having taking a cab directly to the hostel instead of trying to navigate her way by bus to the train station to meet us at the ever omnipresent mcdonalds. again, luckily, it was about that same time that theresa and i decided that i would head back to the hostel to check on her flight status since we could get internet access there. she would stay at the station on the off chance that dasia showed up. well, as i'm frantically searching online for answers to our questions - who other than dasia pops her head into the internet room to have a peak. sooooo lucky! she actually peaked in by accident, and otherwise theresa and i would have spent a very un-fun day in the train station. but everything works out in the end.

so since then - guess i told the long story instead of the short one - we've been roaming firenze and soaking in all that is italian culture. and doing some major window shopping - the shoes are fantastico! unfortunately, my budget is not :(

we of course have seen the duomo upwards around a million times, climbed the top of it once, walked the ponte vecchio about five times, saw a couple fake davids (the real one is just too expensive for us cheap backpackers), sat on a few church steps people watching, and had lots of pizza and a little wine. chianti, of course. we also made a day trip to siena, which is a really nice town in the middle of tuscany. gorgeous views and just good atmosphere.

today we are heading out to cinque terre, by way of pisa, to get a little northern italian coast in us. supposed to be one of the most beautiful places to see. so i'm quite excited. hopefully we will find a place to spend the night, as we didn't make reservations.. all part of the adventure, right? after that, it's down to roma for 3 nights, til dasia head back to texas and theresa and i fly to vienna austria.

ciao bellas.