Florence and Visit to Uncle Peter's

Now let the song begin! Let us sing together 


Of sun, stars, moon and mist, rain and cloudy weather,

Light on the budding leaf, dew on the feather,

Wind on the open hill, bells on the heather, 


Reeds by the shady pool, lilies on the water: 


Old Tom Bombadil and the River-daughter!

       One of Tom Bombadil's songs from The Fellowship of the Ring

Hello everyone!  Sorry about the lack of posting last week.  I am now posting about the rest of my spring break travels (or at least the last ones out of the country).  This will be relatively brief.  And the poem at the beginning is not that related to my travels.  But oh well.

So, Florence!  Florence was very cool.  And I mean that literally.  It was freezing.  I had been hoping to get some sunny Tuscan warmth over my spring break, but not a chance!  We hardly ever saw the sun, and two out of the four days we were there, we got snow flurries.  Not exactly pleasant.

We had a very nice hostel.  The four of us travelers, me, Allison, Ryan, and Melissa, had a room all to ourselves.  That turned out to be very nice.  Here's Melissa walking through the hostel doors.  Looks pretty fancy, right?  Well, everything in Florence looks fancy.

Here's some pictures of us at dinner.  Note the large amounts of wine about to be consumed by Allison and Ryan.  Allison was fine, but Ryan was a little happy afterwards.

I spent the entire time we were in Florence thinking about my friend Mary, because I knew she would love it there so much.  Lots of very interesting architecture, completely different from what I had seen before.  And lots of little shops with very expensive things in them, like this shop right outside our hostel that excited me very much:

I didn't buy any hats though.

Instead of giving you a day by day, hour by hour retelling of our sightseeing, I'm just going to give you some highlights.  This is somewhat because there is too much to tell, somewhat because we saw so many things that I lost track of everything we were seeing (don't worry, I saved all the tickets so I can remember later), and somewhat because I didn't take pictures of everything.  This was because 1) it was too cold for me to really want to take my hands out of my pockets and 2) you aren't really allowed to take pictures inside any of the museums.  So, you will not be experiencing all of the Renaissance art that we experienced.  I will instead take a brief moment to describe it to you:

Lots of naked people.  This, I got used to fairly quickly.  And LOTS of pictures of Mary.  And almost always in one of the three scences:  the annunciation by the angel Gabriel, Mary holding baby Jesus, or Mary being crowned queen of heaven.  You see this to the point that you hardly stop and look at any of the Mary paintings anymore.  Except to notice how little exposure these artists must have had to real live human babies.

So, some Florence highlights:

The first thing I must mention is the gelato!  Gelato is a wonderful dessert that tastes somewhat like ice cream, except richer and with less fat (apparently the fat coats your tongue and keeps you from tasting the full flavor of real ice cream).  We ate gelato six times in four days.  It was brilliant, as the Irish like to say.  Here's a gelato display:

And here's me, Melissa, and Allison eating gelato:

The day we arrived in Florence, we went to a few museums.  It turned out that it was International Women's Day!  That meant that Allison, Melissa, and me got free tickets into the museums!  But poor Ryan still had to pay.  Why don't we celebrate this in the US?

Us holding our free tickets:

Anyone who goes to Florence sees the Duomo.  Duomo is the Italian word for "home," not "dome" as many people think it is.  The dome on this church is the largest dome made of bricks, according to Wikipedia.  It is really very huge.  At the time it was built, it was the second largest dome after the pantheon.

Here's some views of the inside.  We got a tour for free from an Asian student on some kind of exchange program.  The scene painted on the underside of the dome is the Last Judgement.

Outside the Duomo is the Baptistry.  The baptistry is from an earlier time period, and you can tell by the art on the inside of the dome.  It is full of scenes from Bible stories.

We saw Michelangelo's David as well.  That was very awesome.  It really is an amazing statue.  Besides being absolutely huge,  it's just amazing how natural his pose is, and yet how intense he looks.  He has a very intense expression on his face.  No pictures allowed, though.

We also went to the Piazza della Signoria.  That is the very famous piazza with lots of famous statues (Michaelangelo's  David used to be there, but they've got a copy there now so they can keep him safe inside).  The statue called Rape of the Sabines is there too.  It's silhouetted in the picture below:

You can see the Rape of the Sabines statue on the right in the picture below:

 

On our second day there, we went to the Uffizi, which is the Italian for "offices" because it used to be a big government office building.  Now it's a big art gallery.  There was lots of art there, including paintings by Michelangelo, Raphael, and the Birth of Venus and Primavera by Botticelli. But again, no pictures!  Here's a view of the outside:

There was also a nice view of this very famous bridge from the inside on the top level:

We walked across it later, and it had lots of jewelry shops on it.  But before we did that, we had to drop Ryan off at the hostel, because he got sick.  Poor Ryan.  Then we headed across the bridge, to the Medicci Palaces.  The Medicci were a really rich family in Florence who paid for just about everything you see in the city (as in, almost all of the art and almost all of the buildings).  I have a completely new definition of "rich" and "showy" after seeing the rooms in this palace.  They were ridiculous.

They had an awesome garden in the back.  We had a lot of fun exploring it.

There were some great views of the city:

Allison being silly:

We found some cool things in the woods.  It felt very explorer-like.

We also found a friend!  I don't know if you can tell, but this kitty is very, very pregnant.  She was about ready to pop.  Holy cow.

We also went to this church, Santa Croce:

Inside were lots of graves.  Here's the grave of Michelangelo:

And here's the grave of Galileo:

We went to the science museum and saw Galileo's telescope too.

A few other highlights:

Michelangelo's Deposition, or Florence Pieta.  The man holding Christ's body, Nicodemus, is thought to be a self-portrait of Michelangelo.

A cool ceiling in one of the museums:

Ireland on a really old map!

After Florence, I took the train to Geneva, Switzerland to visit my Uncle Peter, Aunt Laurianne, and cousins Antoine and Christopher.  A view from the train:

I had to change trains in Milan (all by myself!) and I spent my two spare hours hanging out in a McDonalds with all my luggage.  Here's the train station.  I was very impressed with it, personally.

My uncle has an awesome house in Switzerland.  It was an old farm house that they fixed up themselves.  It's absolutely gorgeous.  Like a model home.  They're moving to London soon for Uncle Peter's new job, but they're keeping the house and renting it to other people.

Now, before this trip, I hadn't seen these cousins of mine for six years.  Christopher, who was 4 the last time we saw each other, didn't really remember me.  However, we got along fantastically.  He tried to teach me how to pronounce French words, which I was not very good at.  We also spent a good amount of time chasing each other around the house, throwing beanbag balls at each other.  Antoine, who was 8 last time we saw each other, remembered me, but boy, has Antoine changed.  For one thing, he is  now taller than me (surprise surprise).  For another thing, he is a cool dude.  He's got the long messy hair thing going, and he wears very fashionable clothes.  He is also very intellectual.  We spent a brief amount of time talking about philosophy, such as whether or not everyone sees colors the same way and the problem of the existence of evil in a world ruled by a good God.  Basically, I have really cool cousins.  I only got to see them for the weekend, but I was so sad to leave.  I actually cried when they left for school on Monday.  :(  Here's a picture of them.

I got to spend a lot of time with Uncle Peter.  Here are some pictures of our trip around Geneva:

This is me in front of the four fathers of the Reformation.  The tall one right above my head is John Calvin.

We also went to the Reformation museum, which was pretty cool.  You could see Bibles that Luther used, listen to a dinner debate about predestination that Calvin had hosted at his house, and listen to hymns like "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God" while sitting on real wooden pews.


I thought this was pretty awesome.  Toddler-sized chess pieces.

I also went on a walk on the top of the Saleve, the mountain that looks over Geneva.  There was still snow up there, and it was beautiful.

Me and Tante Lolo (with Uncle Peter's shadow):

Finally, I flew back home.  It was a bummer leaving.  It had been really nice to spend time in a big fluffy bed, in a real house, with a real family, eating real meals for a weekend.  Oh, and some elderly British lady offered me wine in the airport terminal (she and her friend had ordered some from the bar).  Here's a view out the plane window just before landing in Dublin.  In the bottom of the picture is the Howth peninsula, the place I went earlier in the semester (there's a whole blog post about it).  I could actually see the places that I'd visited from the air.

The end!