Getting settled in Florence

Sorry I haven’t posted that much lately. We’re really busy in Italy and have had some problems getting on the internet regularly, so it’s been hard to do the blog.  But we’ve been in Italy for a couple weeks and it’s really great!  Because we’re having a lot of problems time-wise and internet-wise, we’re going to just post some pictures with captions and combine some of the stuff we’ve done in Italy.

We got to Florence and settled into our apartment on via Pier San Maggiore.  We’re in a great location, right near the Duomo, one of the main things in Florence – a huge cathedral with a giant dome on top (as you can see in the video we posted!).  There’s also a tall belltower, called the Campanile, and a building called the Baptistery where children used to get baptized.  They are all hundreds of years old, and the Baptistery is even more like a thousand years old!  All 3 of these buildings are really interestingly colored – dark green, rosy pink, and white.  They don’t look like any buildings anywhere else (except for the church we saw in Siena, which I’ll talk about later) especially in America!

To me, in some areas, Florence is pretty dirty and graffitied, but in most places, there are really old buildings everywhere you look and that is pretty cool.  It’s really neat being in a city, too – there are so many restaurants, great people watching, and you can walk in the streets because there aren’t many cars (though you have to watch out because there are some cars, and lots of crazy bikes!).  There are little narrow backstreets leading to all different places, and beautiful churches and towers and piazzas (which is what they call squares).

We’re also in a great location, store- and food-wise too.  The apartment has a great sandwich shop right nearby and a lot of great restaurants with amazing pizza and pasta, like Mastrocilegia (which we think might mean “master of cherry” -- don’t ask).

We have 5 really good gelato places right near us – our favorite so far is Rivareno.  Gelato is like ice cream but a hundred times creamier and sweeter and I can’t really explain it but it’s SO good.  They have like 50 flavors and the way they’re presented is CRAZY: let’s say the flavor is coconut: they would have real coconut on it sliced in half and the gelato is piled up in these HUGE stacks.  It’s really awesome.  If it was chocolate they’d have huge chocolate bars on it for decoration.  Some of our favorite flavors are cioccolato (chocolate), straciatella (vanilla and chocolate chips), menta (mint), cioccolato bianco (white chocolate), tres di cioccolato (triple chocolate), and the last one is vaniglia e cookies (vanilla and cookies).  We’ve had gelate every single day so far!  (Even twice a couple times).

 

Our apartment is really different than home.  It was really creepy at first.  It is really old, it has huge high ceilings, and it was pretty dark (the hallway light only stays on for 4 seconds before turning off), before we got some lamps.  It’s really big and is usually a dorm for students and mine and Dylan’s room has 4 beds and mom and dad’s room has 3 beds – 7 beds in all if you can’t do the math!   We have a nice kitchen and living room with an amazing arched brick ceiling that it lit by a modern lamp different from the rest of the apartment.  It has a balcony overlooking the street and a little piazza.  It’s really fun to people watch!  I’ve gotten really good at climbing up onto the window (which is really high) to watch the piazza.

Dylan and I decided to make our room a bit more homey.  So we decided to make our beds decorated with stuff we’ve gotten on our trip and give them themes.  Mine is “Casey’s Tropical Hangout” and Dylan’s is “Dylan’s Warrior Hideout.”  Mom, Dylan, and I devised a pulley system that we can use to pass notes from one bed to another (involving a rope and a basket) that is really awesome!

I’ll post more on Florence soon!

A little Florence video

Here is a video we made the other day in Florence using an app called Vidrhythm. We made it mostly while we were on top of the bell tower in Florence, which was built in the 1300s and is right next to the famous church, the Duomo. You can see the giant dome in the video. We climbed to the top of the tower -- 414 steps on a very narrow stairway! It was pretty tiring but the view of the whole city was amazing!

Here is the link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPUaWoivRFU&feature=youtube_gdata_player

Trip to Bachalpsee (or Lake Bachalp)

We woke up later than usual and had a wonderful buffet breakfast outside, at our hotel. We headed out for the gondola ride to the stop called "First," which was WAY up the side of one of the huge Alps around Grindelwald. The gondola ride was beautiful, filled with rocky cliffs, snowy peaks, foamy waterfalls, lush green meadows, and flowers in bloom. When we got to First, we began our hike to Bachalpsee (Bachalp =Bachalp, see=Lake). It was an awesome hike with all the snowy peaks, shortcuts (which were great, really fun, but one resulted in a mud and snow covered child), and snow along the path, perfect for snowball fights, which we had quite a few of.

Here is the view we had while on the hike:

Here is me after slipping and sliding in the snow and mud:


More views along the way:

We got to the lake hidden up in the mountains and it was so cool!  Bachalpsee looked amazing in the magazines we saw, but the pictures totally DID NOT do justice to the real thing.  We had a snack and played on the snow at this amazing place for a while.

On top of the world!

We hiked back from the lake and had lunch with great hot chocolate on a big deck on top of the mountain.  (My dad tried a traditional Swiss dish called “raclette” that was really gross and weird, but I don’t want to go into it because it makes me want to throw up.  It was basically a pool of melted cheese with some potatoes on the side.  Blech!).

Then dad and I did this awesome thing that was sort of like a zip cord, but not really.  It was called “the First Flyer” and it was basically a kind of harness that you sit on and get strapped in to and then you fly down from one cable car stop all the way to another cable car stop, which is way down the mountain.  It looked crazy and scary and you couldn’t even see where you were going to end up in the distance. 

Here is a poster advertising the "First Flyer" that we saw after doing it (we didn't get any good pictures or videos of the real thing because, well, we were ON it):

You put your feet up on this gate in front of you and then the person helping you says “Ok, you ready?” If you reply “yes,” then they press a button and the gate goes away and you just zoom out into open air and zoom down the mountain at like 90 mph.  It was AWESOME – so much fun!!  Dad and I were both at equal speeds at the beginning, but then he started getting faster and faster and I got slower, but then suddenly I passed him and flew past him.  The ending was NOT as smooth as we expected – we thought you would slow to a stop, but not at all.  You go just as fast as you do in the beginning if not faster, since you just went down a huge mountain, and then suddenly you see ground and a house in front of you and you brace yourself for the impact and when you’re about to hit it, you go “pweeechk” – you swing up in the air really hard.  

Dylan was too young to do it, so he and mom hiked down to the next stop – it took us 36 seconds and it took them 25 minutes!  (That tells you how far our flight was!).  They had a great hike though – they even got a little lost and were worried they wouldn’t make it to the last cable car. 

We all met up and took the cable car down and went back to the hotel and then rested and had a last dinner in Switzerland.  Tomorrow: Italy!!