Florence

After finishing the week of work with Shannon, if you can call working in Switzerland "work", we hopped on a train and headed to Florence, Italy.

Shannon is standing on the little street where our hotel was as we headed out on Saturday for our Florence adventure.

Again, as background, I worked with Shannon over the past two years at Dale City ES. We co-taught last year and I was very sad to see Shannon leave at the end of the year. BUT, she was going to Switzerland to teach for a year... can't really compete with that! She talked with her principal and told her I was great at Differentiated Instruction. Thus, the invitation to present to the TASIS school staff, the free trip to Switzerland, and a weekend in Italy!

Anyway, we head off first thing in the morning and head towards Uffizi Gallery. The lines were pretty long already at 9:30am. So, we explored the Piazza della Signoria. Lots of statues as well as a replica of David (left corner):

From there we head over to stand in line to see the real David by Michelangelo. We waited in line for two hours! This really put a kink in the rest of our plans for the day; since we only had a day to spend in Italy we couldn't spend the whole time standing in lines. Anyway, we made it in to see David as well as some other unfinished works by Michelangelo. Pretty amazing. Turns out you can't take pictures in the Academia. Too bad we didn't know that until after we took the pictures!

After our two hour wait, we headed out for lunch. Beautiful day, so we sat in one of the outdoor resturants, had wonderful pasta and drank some wine :) Here's Shannon enjoying our day:

It wasn't long before the shopping called to us! We wandered around the markets for a little while. Shannon got a nice leather jacket, I got a purse and some other little things for the girls and Bill. On our way back to our hotel, we stopped to look at the Baptistry bronze doors and the Duomo.

We dropped off our stuff at our hotel and headed over to the Boboli Gardens. But, not before stopping by for some ice cream! The walk over the Ponte Vecchio was very busy, but impressive. Here is a view of the bridge from the Uffizi Gallery:

There were also lines to get into the gardens. After some consideration, I decided as pretty as the gardens must be, it would be better to get into the Uffizi Gallery to see Botticelli's Venus that to see flowers. Some disappointment to find that Raphael's angel paintings were not open for viewing, but did see some other beautiful things by Michelangelo and other Renaissance painters. We did get a few nice views from the top of the Uffizi Gallery overlooking Florence:



It had been a beautiful day with great weather! We finished off our day with wine and a little Italian resturant. A great day, and we got to see just about everything on the Top Ten list. Not bad for a day of work :)