Firstly, an apology. The camera ran out of battery on the upload, so there are no photos. I will do a special photo post tomorrow. Or whenever I manage to get some more AAs. I thought I put the power cable in, but no it’s the AV-out cable.
Milly is still sick, only sicker. She has huge tonsils and fever, on top of runny nose and cough. We thought maybe we should take her to a doctor and get some antibiotics, as it would be a shame to lose her so early in the trip. Seemed simple enough, there’s a red cross on the map, that must be a hospital. And within a stone’s throw of one of the bus stops. Couldn’t be easier, so we caught the very first hop on-hop off bus of the day (with a convenient stop a few hundred metres from the apartment) and sped off.
Needless to say we couldn’t find a hospital at the marked location, as there wasn’t one. We did find a sign pointing in the direction of a hospital so we walked that way, hopeful. I won’t bore you with the details, except to say that we have seen a lot of Florence that we hadn’t planned on seeing. We started out from home at 9am and about 1 pm we were finally at a hospital. Fortunately the hospital was the easy bit, only a 15-minute wait and 15€ later we had a script and were back on the streets. Shortly thereafter we had the much needed antibiotics and a bus home. It was a good move getting a 2-day ticket for the HOHO bus, we have got value from that.
The doctor confirmed the tonsillitis diagnosis (which wasn’t hard) and suggested Milly might have pneumonia as well!
Michelle thought she had better stay with Milly during the afternoon. Being the devoted family man I am, I abandoned them and went back into the city to look around some more. I walked up and down every interesting side street I could find, and there are a lot of them. Florence is quite a contrast to Rome, as the city is comprised entirely of tiny little streets and mainly pedestrian traffic. It’s also much cleaner. Everyone in Italy seems to smoke and in Rome it shows, as there are cigarette butts everywhere. Much less so in Florence.
Navigating around Florence city centre is reasonable easy, as whenever you look up you can see either the Florence Cathedral or the tower of the Palazzo Vecchio. This will make more sense when I post the photos, or when you look it up. I ventured into the Cathedral and marvelled at its octagonal dome. I really do recommend you Google it because it is quite fascinating. The photos won’t do it justice. The dome doesn’t start until 50-odd metres off the ground, then the dome itself is 40-odd metres high which adds up to a sore neck when you try and take photos from the ground. I didn’t climb the bell tower, which claims to have 400+ steps. I don’t really do steps unless I have to, especially more than 400 of them.
Being an engineer at heart, stopping to photograph interesting bridges wherever I come across them, I was more than a little taken with the Ponto Vecchio. I have about 100 photos of it that I am happy to share, plus a little statuette thing as well. I mean, it’s a bridge, much more important and impressive than a silly church.
The latest news is Milly is hanging in there and has ordered gelato for dinner, so she must be okay. We ate at the little restaurant over the road, meaning about 5 metres from the front door. We are off to Venice tomorrow so I’d better get some more batteries ASAP. I suspect there will be some bridges needing documenting.
Until then, arrivederci.
Steve J.