Ciao!
June 20, 2004
We took the night train from Paris to Florence last night. We went to sleep in France and woke up in Italy. Unlike in France, neither of us speak the local language here, so we've been doing a lot of staring at people when they talk to us. The keyboards here are much more reasonable than in France. Only the punctuation is in a weird place, not the letters.
Yesterday, we went to mass at the cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris. We skipped the Quasimodo tour to the bell towers, since we already saw the whole city from the top of the Arc de Triomphe and our legs, in the French tradition, were on the verge of rebellion. The mass was beautiful. The homily was beyond my French skills, but I understood a sentence or two.
We haven't had time to do much since arriving in Italy. We saw Il Duomo, the large cathedral with the massive dome built by Bruneleschi and ate some authentic Tuscan food. Almost everything is closed on Sundays, so we're looking forward to a quiet night back in our hotel.