2003/10/26 – Sunday

After all the fun of Saturday, Sunday was a pretty relaxing day. We went to Ronato & Maria’s for lunch. Ronato came to pick us up. We stopped by Piazza di Michelangelo on the way so Ryan could buy some paintings. I picked up a soccer shirt, since I kinda wanted one since the last time I went (it didn’t end up coming home with me, but my mom’s bringing it at Thanksgiving). Maria made awesome lunch. Since I hadn’t eaten since the feast on Saturday, I was ready for more good food. I don’t recall everything we had, but she made some pesto pasta just for me, and had a shrimp pasta everyone else ate. I tried a little of that, and didn’t like it. However, I did really like the smoked salmon.

After eating, talking some, etc., we headed to San Gimigano. An interesting medieval town, with many feuding nobles. Each family built a tower to show their importance. At one point 72 towers stood above the city. Only 14 have survived the years. It was slightly rainy while we were there, but we survived with a few umbrellas. Mostly we just walked around, peering through the shop windows and occasionally entering one to look around. In the largest square kind of in the center of the town there’s an old well, with groves in the concrete from the ropes pulling the buckets up. I bought a topographical picture of Italy at one of the shops, and my brother picked up some wine. On the way back we stopped at a pizza place. Actually it was more like a house turned into a restaurant, which is not too uncommon to find. The pizza was very good, I didn’t think I was going to be hungry enough to eat a whole one, but I succeeded. Again, the best restaurants are known only by the locals.

We arrived back in Florence to pretty heavy rain, so we scrambled a bit to get things out of the car which is how my shirt got left behind. Since we had to be up early early, we spent the night packing things up and getting everything ready to go.

2003/10/26 – Sunday

We woke up around 0500 or so if my memory serves me correctly. Alberto got up to call a cab and see us off. We were out the door before 0530, and on our way home. We flew from Fierenze to Frankfurt first, then directly to Phoenix. Our flights were both on time, and no real issues. The Frankfurt airport is somewhat interesting, we had to go through this long tunnel which was all futuristic like, pastel lighting and synth music playing. We had to go through security and check in again, so there wasn’t much time to wait for our connecting flight. I picked up a German newspaper that was laying around, since I thought Tim might enjoy it. On the flight from Frankfurt, all the flight attendants would speak to my bro and me in German, since we both look fairly German. The flight was fairly mixed in terms of Germans and Americans. For the most part I knew what they were asking already, so I just answered in English (they were all bilingual). Besides that I tried to sleep most of the time which was difficult since it was a 10 hour flight in daylight the whole time. We arrived in Phoenix around 1330, and it was took another hour and a half to get our bags and through customs, a small price – partially because we were bringing food back, but mostly just the time waiting for bags.

So that’s it. London, Brugge, Brussels, Pisa, Florence, Sienna, San Gimigano, and an awesome wedding all in 11 days. Another note of interest learned on the trip, the economy in Italy is doing very poor. Many people are blaming the Euro, since prices have gone up significantly, but pay hasn’t increased. The government is running low on funds, and wants to raise the age required to qualify for retirement benefits. Of course, the people aren’t too happy with that idea. We learned from talking with Alberto that there are many tax laws for businesses which are designed to bring in money to the government, and not designed to promote a prosperous business environment, which certainly is not helping the economy and will hurt the government’s cash flow in the long run. Unemployment rates are very high, somewhere around 15% was the best guestimate. Hopefully things will turn around for the country, but it looks like tough times will continue for a while.

Back to present time, Monday I went to the Jimmy Eat World concert with Tim & Jenny. There was only one cover band, which was nice – but I didn’t much care for their music, it was a little entertaining, and humorous at times. Jimmy was ok, they put a different spin on the songs they played, but they didn’t play a lot of my favorites, so I was a little disappointed in that. It was interesting and good times, but I enjoyed the soco concert better.