Yesterday I ran out of laundry. I packed for 5 days, wanting to travel light and knowing that we'd get a shot at doing our laundry at some point. In my dreams we would come home after a day of seeing interesting sights and load our laundry into the washer and dryer convienently located next to our bed. It turns out INSTEAD, that when your clothes start standing up on their own around Day 11 out of 5 the closest self-service lavanderia is ten minutes away, and washing and drying and folding a single load of laundry is something that takes about two hours. This mundane, household chore took up our entire morning. I'm not sure if the benefits of traveling light outweigh the drawbacks of actually doing laundry while on vacation. If I had it to do again, and had some extra Euro jingling in my pocket, I guess I'd still travel light but pay someone else to do pickup, cleaning, and dropoff. Champagne wishes and cavier dreams.
With the laundry out of the way, we hit the streets of Florence to do some shopping. The store fronts were nice, and we bought a couple of things there, but the more interesting experience was the street market. A dozen blocks or more of little booths, selling goods made of leather and venician glass, lots of other random things. Silly trinkets abounded, such as 3 inch tall David statues and last supper placemats. There was also a great proliferation of "foreign" stuff, especially (inexplicably) Simpsons and Hello Kitty t-shirsts, posters, mugs, etc. The streets were packed with tourists, beggers and peddlers of the beautiful and the profane. All of this was going down in a piazza outside of a cathedral, which gave the market a bizarrly biblical atmosphere. We turned down many "half price" leather jackets, wrong-color 1up mushroom t-shirts, boxer shorts printed to look like the David ("down there"), etc, but we managed to buy a few things.
Today was "shoppin day" and tomorrow is "culture day", but our walking still took us by a couple of pretty amazing churches. Gigantic, intricate, colorful buildings that you kind of have to see in person to really believe. I snapped some photos that I know aren't going to do them justice at all. More to come tomorrow when we visit cultural sites on purpose.
Two more excellent meals for lunch and dinner today. Every real meal we have eaten here has been excellent. The meat is a bit too tender and fatty for our tastes, but the pasta and dolci are amazing. For lunch Elly and I got brave and ordered "Tris Dello Chef", which is the Chef's selection of three pasta dishes. All three were something we probably would not have ordered given the choice, but were quite good. We were both happy to have taken the risk. The highlight of dinner tonight was the dessert: fresh strawberries with marscapone cheese, sprinkled with chocolate nibs.
Today is running a bit short, so a word on tipping:
I'm not sure I've got this entirely figured out, but I think you basically never, ever tip here. All sit-down meals have a "coperto" cover charge per-person, and when you pay your bill at the end you pay the register directly, usually cash. I'm used to tipping a bit above 20% at home, so no additional tip at all has taken a bit of getting used to, and has left me feeling guilty and ashamed most of the time.
Tonight at dinner we had the best service we've had so far in Italy so I tipped 2 Euro on a 30 Euro tab. The coperto was 2 Euro per person, so I basically gave a 50% bump to the required cover. Only two euro and the server was all "Grazie mille! Have a good night! Grazie, good night, thank you, thank you." and clearly QUITE happy about the tip. This has both cemented my belief that tipping is a rarely-or-never sort of thing, but also showed me what a difference a Euro or two can make to a server's night. I'm not really sure how to proceed in the future. Ah well. A concern for the morning. Good night Internet!
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