SMN, farmacia, C and sons, Conad, Euro, Michel plaza

ABsoLUTEly exhausted! Blogger letting me know I´ve misspelled that,)

 One of the plaza´s by the main train/bus station SMN, around the corner (see below) and around the corner again, is the main tourist info. Inside is a beautiful building with flying buttresses and other traditional architecture, frescoes, statues etc. Beside the tourist info, inside. The church itself is an actual church, surrounding a lovely courtyard garden....Again, it would be extremely rude to take photos inside, or to disturb the inside of the church with touristy things such as taking photos and videos.

 The photos do not do any of the architecture here justice. The detail is so absolutely breathtakingly intricate, endlessly repetitive or repeating though not exactly, with frescoes, tile work, marble inlay, plasterwork, statuettes, reliefs, etc. changing ambience in all the changing soft warm light, over the day, especially as the weather itself  changes, with varying degrees of clouds, sunshine, over cast, and grey to blue to yellow to orange light....

These are found often along walls, if you look for them. Some are up high like this one, and some are closer to street and eye level, or even lower than the street level. The black thing hanging down is to hold a candle. Either side someone placed real flowers in water. Others hung up old intricate metal and wood crosses...beads, or necklaces with rosary beads...some place tiny slips of paper with prayers written on them then folded quietly together...

 This is a fantastic Italian butchers. Every surface including ceiling has different types of cured and salted meats, sausages, boar, wild game, etc. If you look closely, you can see the hams hanging from the ceiling, and the boar´s head hanging from the wall on the right hand upper side of all the photos. Further inside, is endless types of raw meat (not poultry, as that is another type of speciality shoppe). It would have been extremely rude of me to take photos inside, which is why I did not.

 to the left of the butcher shoppe is a trattatoria, with meals made from similar foods.

Up early, exhausted still even after a long night´s rest, had breakfast 8am, then a long hot bubble bath. Was famished, so had:

blood red orange/grapefruit juice
2 small pieces of what looked like melba toast, with butter
a fruit yogurt with fruit
a toasted ham and cheese sandwich
a cappuccino

still hungry and thirsty

so had yet another glass of blood red orange/grapefruit juice
and an espresso

!

Long hot bubble bath, dried hair, quickly dressed....in too much Norwegian clothing it was obvious too late, as I walked around for 3 hours steaming hot til I had a chance finally to drop off my coat and sweater!

Had a fab morning doing nothing much but wandering, finding new places, nooks and crannies in tiny alleyways--got

-a tiny Florence calendar the size of a 3" square with various local photos

-a small notebook with grid lines in red and blue. Both for 1Euro

Then got

-some cute translucent soaps with ducks/bubbles, frogs/frog feet, dog/bones, cat/fish. The main soap was translucent color, with the main theme in solid colors
- Italian kids bandaids
-lavender bathbalms. All for 1 Euro

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Italy or not, I still have to have shampoo, soap, contact solution etc, so waited to buy new here. Today at the local farmacia (chemist/pharmacy), I got

-Italian contact solution

-Aveeno shampoo and soap

-bottled water

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Lunch was a lovely family lunch. As I was still very thirsty and hungry, I enjoyed some acqua natureale (non-sparkling bottled water), some Prosecco, a Greek salad, lasagna, more acqua naturale, more Prosecco, tiramisu, more acqua naturale, cioccolata calda (a hot chocolate) which was perfectly more very very chocolate tasting than just sugary sweet. And a bit later after sitting a bit to enjoy the atmosphere of the old Italian frescoes on the wall, and Venetian glass chandeliers, and just relax, sipping the rest of my cioccolata calda, I had another cappuccino and some more acqua. It was a long meal. Very Italian:).

.......

Spent a few hours walking that off, and riding the bus up to Michelangelo Plaza and Fiesole. And helping a few other tourists like myself, who had not bought a quatro biglietti (a bus ticket, mine had 4 ticket rides on it), and the bus driver was out of tickets so they couldn´t ride. Since I had 3 more left on my ticket I stamped my ticket for them...technically, that means in reality they did not have tickets, so they could have gotten up to a 240 Euro fine (which I told them), but the driver saw me punch my ticket for them and if anyone had checked I would have shown my ticket for them. They all paid me cash, the price of the ticket. So I´ll just get another tomorrow. I told them what and where to buy tickets, and that it was cheaper too than buying on the bus, and good for when the bus driver has run out.

It was nice helping other tourists, as we´ve all been in that spot--something tiny like that goes wrong and you´re gonna miss a bus to Rome (as they would have!) or similar! I think it´s part of everyone´s traveling code--you help when you can, and hopefully others help you when you need it too.

I hadn´t actually meant to charge them, but they insisted on paying what it cost, so I just too a few Euros. And then I made sure they got off at the correct stop, to catch their connection to the Rome bus.

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Other errands, at some point I went grocery shopping at one of the local Conads, which I always call Conran after a London shoppe. Conad, conad!   Just got a few picnic things:

oranges, fruit

large salty pretzels

pastry with a center of yellow egg custard

almond biscotti

almond torrone (nougat)

A soft savory cheese with arugula

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Oh and had meant today to get a new umbrella, a large one, and had been about to do that after grocery shopping, when as I stepped out of the shoppe, there were a stack of large and small umbrellas outside the door on the sidewalk! I went to of course immediately help myself to checking them out, picking up the color I wanted, looking around to the shop keeper as I assumed they were the shoppes, but...

it was one of the two guys behind me, who had been selling them and had stopped to get something to eat. I think he thought I was gonna steal them!,) As soon as he started to freak out, I smiled brightly at him, and started thanking him for saving me the trouble to go round to the umbrella shoppe, and how much was it...

He was a bit flustered, but as soon as he realized I was not stealing the umbrellas, he smiled too and I made sure he didn´t need to feel embarrassed, and thanked him again for selling me one. Of course he tried to walk off with an entire tenner! but I smiled again, and said he owed me 2 change. His friend laughed at him for taking the piss/and that I so easily got my change, without bitching once about it:). We all laughed. And to be environmentally correct (and to save me the trouble of finding a plastic´s recycling bin) I also gave them back the plastic outer cover, to put on one of the other large umbrellas which had none. He was happy about that, and it helped us both out.

They were from one of the African countries, and were wearing some really nice colorful caps, which as I walked off, I wondered if they´d let me exchange for some Norwegian coins. I think Nic and Elle would like the caps for barnehage...kult lua! (cool ...uhm...lua loosely translates as knitted cap which is warm but not a baseball cap!). So if I see them again over there at the Conrad, I will ask. Maybe.

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Ice skating, English tea, lots of sightseeing, lots of walking and hiking, and going round to the artist shop to get supplies to plein air paint! Another slight luxury and part of being here, is buying my supplies here. Tomorrow and the next, will get canvas, new brushes, new paints...maybe some fancy charcoal leads...and maybe some ink and a quill to make some detailed black and white paintings.

I´m thinking umbers, ochres, greys, a black, the green of the shutters here.

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PS

LIST OF Grocery stores and locations in Florence. One of the Conad City locations is second on the link.