All right, my friends, we’re going to talk about Florence! It’s a place in Italy.

Your Daily Lex

It occurs to me I’m running dangerously close to being like an old school neighbor saying, come over and look at my slides from my trip to whatever.

But I don’t know, you don’t have to listen to my podcast.

You can leave at any time.

Don’t, it’s a good show.

But here we go.

We got to Florence, you know, we took the high speed train.

It was fun.

The train goes more than 200 miles an hour.

Our ears popped a lot.

We were a little bit nervous going to the train station, you know, will we be able to figure out things and follow the instructions?

But it all went fine.

We dropped off our stuff at the hotel room in Florence.

The room was already ready, which was wonderful.

And then we went to the Florence Synagogue, which much like the one in Rome, was huge and cool.

We had a pizza lunch, which was excellent.

And then we went to the Uffizi Museum.

Uffizi Museum.

Maybe you’ve heard of it.

Maybe you haven’t.

It’s huge.

The biggest bummer with Uffizi is its total lack of air conditioning.

I had written to my kids.

You would have hated it, which they would have, because it was tons of walking and so hot.

Just not air conditioned at all.

So hot.

The things I’ll remember the most about Uffizi were how we saw some cool exhibits and how it was so insanely hot.

Of course, we got gelato.

We walked across a famous bridge.

And then we walked a million miles uphill to a place where you can see all of Florence.

I think it was called like the Piazza de Michelangelo, I think.

We walked to it and we were unsure if we wanted to walk to it because we saw just how far it was and just how high it was.

We were like, let’s just do it.

And we did it.

And I ran out of water.

And that was a question of was I going to buy water there?

Like, no, I’m not going to do that.

And I was like, well, at least I’m going to pee while I’m here.

But then they wanted euros to pee and I didn’t have euros on me, so I didn’t.

It was a lot.

But we got so many steps, as always.

So that was like our first afternoon slash evening in Florence.

The next day, we started our day pretty early.

We went to Boboli Gardens.

If you’ve ever been to Versailles in France, which many of you may have and many of you may not have been, it reminded us of that.

Just mammoth gardens.

Over-engineered with beautiful paths and beautiful landscaping and plant growth and walls and buildings and structures everywhere, statues everywhere.

And we were there so early that we had free reign of Boboli Gardens for a while, where it was really just us for probably the first half hour.

And it was the kind of thing where we only had a couple hours there and we hit 10,000 steps and it was only 9.30 in the morning before we had to do the next thing.

So the next stop was the Duomo, this massive, enormous church in Florence.

I’m not a huge expert on history, but when they started building the Duomo, they didn’t know how they would finish it.

And they had a contest to decide who would build the top dome and what it would look like.

We climbed to the top of the dome, which is 463 cramped, narrow, claustrophobic steps.

You get right up to the ceiling.

And first you’re inside, you can look at the ceiling, which is painted with some of the craziest frescoes, murals, whatever you can imagine.

You’ve heard of the Sistine Chapel, but this is Duomo Chapel.

It’s got Satan, it’s got naked ladies cavorting, it’s got bad guys, it’s got angels, it’s got everything.

It was basically like Stefan on Saturday Night Live describing a club.

Everything was on that ceiling.

It was bonkers.

And then you’re above the ceiling.

And then when you get on top, you can see the entire city of Florence.

It’s quite cool.

So that tour is about an hour long.

We leave the Duomo.

We went through the attached museum, which shows more about the making of the Duomo and the many sculptures inside it.

We had lunch, pizza, of course.

It was insanely delicious.

Then we went to the Academia Gallery, where we saw Michelangelo’s David.

What was interesting was that up until that day, Lauren hadn’t realized how big David was.

Because I was saying, like, that’s you should know when we go to that museum, because it’s the one place that I really remember from Italy from my last trip there as a kid.

So you should know, like, that’s the main thing.

There’s other stuff there.

But the only thing people are really excited about is David.

And she was like, it’s just another statue.

I’m like, it’s enormous.

And she had no idea it was so much larger than life.

That was fun.

But so we did check out that whole museum.

It was fun.

And then we went to the Medici Chapels, but we didn’t bother buying a ticket to go inside.

So then we went back to the Duomo, where we had been that morning.

But we did the other climb that we hadn’t done yet, the bell tower.

That’s another 414 steps straight up.

And then you climb back down.

After doing all those steps, the 463 up and down of the Duomo, of the dome, and the 414 up and down of the bell tower, we never wanted to go on stairs again.

Of course, we went back to our hotel and immediately avoided the elevator from the stairs because we were doing steps everywhere.

It’s crazy.

So after that, we went to a market that was filled with store kiosks and then to a food market.

It was very cool.

We bought some, I can’t remember exactly what they were, but like some Italian candy, some Italian cheese sandwich wrap thing, somewhere like between a panini and a calzone.

It was excellent.

Then we went to the, and again, forgive my Italian, we went to the Santa Croce Basilica, which is a church with the tombs of many famous dead Italians, including Michelangelo, Donatello, other Ninja Turtles, Marconi.

Really cool.

In some cases, you’re just walking right on where the people are buried.

In some cases, they’re in the wall.

And right near the tail end of our time there is when it started to rain.

And we’ve been doing everything on foot.

And so we thought maybe it’ll stop raining.

It wasn’t stopping.

So we stopped for our daily gelato in hopes that the rain would stop and it didn’t stop.

And we kept thinking maybe it’ll stop, maybe it’ll stop.

And so when it would get less, we would rush to another awning, fits and starts, fits and spurts until we finally got to where we were going, back to our hotel.

And it was fine, but we had to dodge a lot of rain and also cars and motorcycles.

Oh my God, I haven’t really talked about the driving and traffic there, but truly insane.

But yeah, it was great.

We really felt like we did a great job that first full day in Florence, because we saw so many things and we did so much walking.

But yeah, very cool.

I really loved Florence.

And yeah, that’s it.

The next day is when we’ll go to Venice.

So get excited for that.

Talk soon.

Goodbye.

Lex.