Florence - Day 1

The rain has come with us and we must run the gauntlet of umbrella sellers that seem to want to shove an umbrella into us every 3 paces. I want to just grab one and say "per niente? grazie!" (free? thanks!) - somehow I don't think they'd like that.

Paalo mostly leads us in the right direction, turning a little too early but we do arrive and immediately notice that the streets are considerably more crowded. When we last visited in was late November and mercifully free of the majority of tourists. We're probably approaching the end of the season so I'd really hate to be here when tourist season is in full force.

I leave Paalo at the apartment while I head over to meet the manager who soon lets us in.

Once left to our own devices we immediately go to connect to the internet - Paalo has business to attend to but unfortunately the internet doesn't seem to be behaving. Confused and befuddled, all our various expertise leads us with nothing. We can see the router, diagnostics tell us that we are connected but we just get time out errors. Pinging doesn't move past the router.

The apartment does offer a computer to use so I head over to get their laptop and see if there's some kind of setting we've missed. Unfortunately their laptop suffers the same problem as ours - one of the guys later tells us that the rain tends to knock out the internet. Hmm, okay.

We do spasmodically test the connection through the evening but as long as it's raining it's proving quite fruitless. We eventually resort to bluetoothing the mobile and using it to connect.

Since Paalo is leaving tomorrow at 4am we go out tonight for a final dinner together


Paalo has the Osso Buco, which is very good, the meat just so tender


and I have the gnocchi con Ragu, soft with a good potato taste


for dessert, Paalo has the zuccotto.