Yet another reason why it is obvious I’m not Italian.

It’s obvious that I’m not Italian, but most of the reasons don’t make me stand out in a crowd:

• I don’t speak Italian
• My hair is blonde-ish
• I have a light complexion with freckles
• I don’t wear skin tight jeans
• Or boots

But these things are all pretty small. Not ALL Italian women wear skin tight jean or boots. After I have colored my hair, the whole blondish thing is much less noticeable. When I am wearing my sunglasses, they fit right in with the style that all of the cool Italians wear. (Square frames, wide arms.)

But the thing that makes me stand out in a crowd (at least right now):

• I don’t wear a coat when the temperatures are above 65 °F

Yesterday, it was positively comfortable. Highs near 70 °F, sunny skies, beautiful!! And I was the only person not wearing a jacket. This makes me think that the summers here are absolutely brutal.

You might remember, there are a lot of dogs in Florence. People take their dogs everywhere. That’s OK. I don’t care. I am not afraid of germs, in fact I think people need more germs. But that’s another story. I’m starting a new photojournalism project while I’m here. I’m going to take pictures of dogs that I see in odd places. Here are the first entries.

That was one happy pooch. She was holding a piece of plastic and that boxer was just going at it!

Do you think they have this one is a medium? All I see is extra small.

Sorry for the bad quality of this photo. It was the bus, and the whole dork thing took over. She wasn’t even making an effort to hide the thing!!

Ruined, all ruined…

My wonderful little town of Florence has turned into a nightmare. The weather is gorgeous, the sun is shining and there are about eleventy billion people trying to walk on the Ponte Vecchio right now. Jim and I have decided that unless they are handing out free Sassicaia, we are going to stay as far away from that place as possible.

We had to go grocery shopping today and spent most of our time trying to find new routes that avoided the crowds to familiar places. We walk with a mission, even if we don’t have one. Most of the people in Florence wander, not walk. Up until two days ago, it was OK. We could get around most people, but not anymore.

My poor, poor city.

But on a lighter note!! Guess what arrived today?

Remember my rant about the Italian Postal system? Well, it looks like I’m going to have to take some of it back.

I got my box from Albion with all of the applications in it. Just so we can all see, let’s have a close up of that box, and in particular the date that it was processed by the post office:

Yes people, that is March 26, 2008. Almost one month after it was sent, I got my priority mail from the good old US of A. It’s Bush’s fault, I know it is.

The good news is I looked through all of the applications and made some choices. The bad news is that who knows if these kids are even interested in attending Albion College anymore?

It just makes me laugh.

Radom sights in Florence.

Most of these photos are from Lisa’s visit, but they are all sufficiently random to put together in one big post.

Piazza Michelangelo is the first place that I take everyone who’s visiting Florence. It has the best views and it is very pretty. It can almost kill you walking up to the top, but that’s another story! There are a couple of souvenir vendors up there, a whole herd of guys selling knockoffs and pretty views. The last two times I was there, there was also an Indian musical group. Indians as in Native Americans, not Indian Indians. Which also would have been rather random.

I didn’t really expect to hear the sounds of flutes and drums up there! I like it better when the gypsy musician is playing. It’s more… Italian. Kind of like this guy, who we saw on the Ponte Vecchio:

There was rain threatening and we had a few sprinkles, so it was pretty empty up there. There are two levels and they are connected by stairs. Usually the stairs are covered with squishy, romantic teenagers or Asian brides. This time, they were deserted. So a group of girls were using them for some photo shoot thingy:

Some were all into it (girl on far right), but you can tell that the girls further down on the stairs were mighty embarrassed! I thought about staying there and taking more pictures just to embarrass them more, but it started to sprinkle and I HATE getting rained on.

Just recently in Italy, they elected a new Prime Minister. There are a bunch of different parties in Italy, but from what I read, it was really just between two people: the mayor of Rome and Silvio Berlusconi. They try to make the elections very fair. You can only put political ads up in certain areas and all the parties have equal representation. The posters made me scratch my head:

This is what I can gather from two posters on the left: The bottom one is for Berlusconi, the top one is against. But doesn’t this go against everything you were ever taught about advertising? Isn’t the top poster just increasing the name recognition of Berlusconi? It must have, because Berlusconi won.

This is Jim’s favorite store:

Not really. It’s a children’s store, but it made me laugh. But I wonder if you can by this book at Bimbo Planet:

I should have posted some like these before everyone came and visited, just to warn you what you would be getting into:

Oh, by the way, the bedroom is a loft. It has a spiral staircase with no outside railing. I hope that you don’t have to get up and pee in the middle of the night!!

On another note, we saw a rally or protest today as we were riding the bus:

Don’t know what they were protesting, but there were lots of flags and people chanting and standing in the streets. I broke the rule about looking like a dork on the bus. I almost killed myself trying to get my camera out to take a picture. Thankfully besides Jim, there were only about five other people on the bus.

Spring is here!

And as you know, my allergies are killing me. But before it got too bad, when Lisa was still here, we went for a long walk up to Piazza Michelangelo. It was a gorgeous walk, even if there was the threat of rain.

Lisa was showing us the sights. She doesn’t like this photo, but I really like it a lot. She looks so Italian!

Even the water works are pretty in Florence!!

I like this picture. It has the Duomo (big dome-y thing on the left), the old wall of the city (underneath the Duomo), the city of Florence and the green areas outside the city walls.

We found a little pathway that was just begging us to walk down it. We found a little hut looking thing. Lisa decided it would be her new house in Florence.

Uh Lisa, I think it needs some work:

It was actually only a door in a wall. There was no house behind it, although someone was calling it home:

We didn’t stick around too much longer after discovering that!!

All of the wisteria is in bloom here. There was one house that should have been in Albion:

The purple and gold was so pretty! The wisteria also made a nice backdrop for the Duomo. (It’s like the leaning tower of Pisa, it’s in EVERY photo!!)

We found a park up near Piazza Michelangelo. It was very peaceful and almost no one was there. We were sad, but in a way happy, to think that almost no tourist ever found this place. Sad because it was so beautiful, but happy because no one was there. We found a sculpture honoring the WWI veterans and noticed something interesting on the rifle:

Is that a trigger lock on the rifle?

Things are blooming and there are a lot of fruit trees around here. I’m always amazed at how fruit grows on trees. For the longest time, I thought that pineapples grew on trees. I thought they hung down from the green part on top, kind of like an apple. When Jim and I went to Hawaii and visited the Dole plantation, I was shocked to find out that they grow out of a little bush-like thing with a stalk on the bottom! (If I had my old computer or my discs, I’d put a picture that I took of a pineapple on here.)

Same with bananas. I know they droop down from palm tree thingies (you like all of the technical terms in this post?), but what we think of as the top of the banana is actually the bottom on the plant! I haven’t seen a banana tree, just pictures. You can check these out at Google Images.)

I don’t know why I was surprised then when I saw a fig tree:

FIGS GROW UP!! And they grow pretty much out of the branch. Weird.

The next post is going to be a good one. We saw a BUNCH of randomness, all in about a two hours stretch. I love it!!

Vanessa and Lisa take Florence by storm!!

My friend Lisa was here last week. We had a good time. You saw a little of Lisa in Venice already. Poor Lisa, when we got back to Florence, I made her do a lot of sight seeing by herself while I went to the lab. But I did take a day off and go to the Uffizi with her.

Before we could get into the Uffizi, we had to wait. I made reservations, which was nice. It cost 4 euro extra, but I hate to wait in lines. We got there about 30 minutes before our reservation and the guard made us go away. So we wandered around for a bit. The Uffizi looks out onto a courtyard with replicas of some of the statuary in the museum.

On one the buildings, we saw a banner that I’m not sure is approved by the government:

This was right around the time that the Olympic torch was in Paris. There’s a guy up there talking on a cell phone and I kept waiting for the Polizi to rush out there and arrest him, but no dice. A week later it’s still hanging from the window, so maybe it is government approved.

Even with pictures that took all of about 5 minutes so Lisa and I had to find some other way to amuse ourselves. We hiked over to the market. Lo and behold, the Porcellina only had about 5 people standing around it. When we first got there, there were some ladies looking up his snout:

It’s just a statue people. He won’t bite you. I’ve since come to find out that if you put a coin in his mouth and let it drop through the grate underneath without stopping, you’ll get your wish. None of these ladies got their wish that day.

Lisa and I both had to rub his snoot. Legend says that if you do it will ensure your return to Florence!

The Uffizi - very crowded, lots of “Annunciation of Mary”s. And they all looked the same. You couldn’t take pictures inside the museum (which was probably a good thing). Plus the lighting was bad. Most of the paintings were covered with glass or plexiglass. I vaguely remember a few years ago when someone tried to throw something at them? I can’t remember.

OK - A complete aside right here. I went to Google (I LOVE the internet) to try to find out what story I was thinking of with the Uffizi and terrorism. I put those two words in and one of the entries that came up was from “The World Almanac for Kids”. Guess what the entry was? Terrorism. (Click for the actual entry.) I don’t know, does that seem like the kind of entry that you want in a Kid’s Almanac? I mean, you don’t want to shield them from everything but COME ON. Anyway. Back to your regularly scheduled pictures.

With the coverings on the paintings, you had to back up and move around and try to get a view that would let you see the painting without a reflection. Plus the tour guides. But I’ve already ranted about them. (See his eyes? Looks drunk doesn’t he?)

One place that you could take pictures was the cafe on the top floor. It overlooks the courtyard. The view was nice. It would have been better if you could have stood on the ledge next to the railings.

Watch out, I’m being arty again!!

We had been in the museum about two hours and were pretty darn tired. It was time to move on.

We had lunch and then went to Santa Croce Museum. Lots of cool people buried there. One of my favorites:

Enrico Fermi!! He won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1938. (Click for Nobel Prize goodness!!) I love the Nobel Prize. October in my favorite month of the year. Other famous scientists in Santa Croce:

Marconi - inventor of the radio. And:

Galileo Galilei. I could have shown you a generic picture of his tomb, which is nice and everything, but I like this one. You can see some of the restorations done in the church. In the top part, you can see the sinopias, and underneath it, the restored paintings. I’m not sure, but I think that some of the frescoes were painted over when the big tombs were put in. You can see the beige behind the tomb and the uncovered painting on the right. I wonder if it was on purpose, but it looks like Galileo is gazing up at Christ on the cross…

Other people buried there:

A Capponi (our friend the count is Count Capponi). And there’s some dude there named Michelangelo Buonerati. Who’s heard of him? Psht….

There’s also this monument, of someone who I really don’t know:

(Check out the mad photoshopping skills!!) Obviously, the yellow circle is important. In 1966, the Arno flooded. There was 16 ft of water in many of the squares, including the one in front of Santa Croce. The water in the church came up to the point indicated by the plaque (which I’ve circled in yellow). A lot of damage was done and they are still restoring some of the paintings.

Lots of religious paintings throughout the church, but only a couple caught my eye:

Look at the table cloth!! It doesn’t come through in this photo especially but across the church, the first thing you notice is the white of the table cloth. But what I love: It has creases. The painter was trying to be so realistic and included the fold marks. He he.

Here’s another one. Note especially the places pointed out by arrows.

I can’t paint. At all. Just look at the pathetic arrows I made in photoshop. But the guys with the hat (blue arrow) has no neck. He gave it all to the woman on the right (yellow arrow).

This one is cool:

The demon in the upper left looks like he has cartoon eyes. The rest of the painting is very renaissance and holy, but that upper left corner looks like something out of Disney. (When I compress the photos for posting on the web, some of the color contrast is lost. I can show you the original photo… But you have to look at all of the other ones too.)

There are some major restorations going on in the church so there is scaffolding everywhere. I don’t have any good photos of the interior, but as I was looking around, I noticed something:

Are those stairs up there? Let’s get a closer look:

They are!! And a door? Do you think that is an office or where Rapunzel lives? Do you think the railing is original or something added later?