A Saturday in Florence

On Saturday morning my bro Fred and I rendezvous at the Munich airport around 7:30am. We’re there in plenty of time for the flight, and neither of us has eaten, so we decide to find a not too expensive café in the airport and breakfast.

We end up dawdling much longer than I’m comfortable with, and at my insistence, Fred finally gets up and moseys to the terminal with me. He assures me that in Germany it’s always possible to get on the plane at the last second, and so he routinely does that when traveling.

Well, the woman at the gate says that usually works when the plane is parked at the terminal, instead of across the tarmac, meaning passengers must be bussed there. We missed the plane.

After Fred hangs his head in shame for a little while, we head over to the Lufthansa Customer Service and start begging. The chipper CSR at the counter assures as that we can hop on the next flight to Florence, only an hour or two away, for a measly fee of 650€ per person. One-way.

Yeah, right. So we haggle and beg and say we’re students and flirt while gagging and eventually we get it down to 250€, round-trip. Nope, huh-uh. We fling a little more woo, watch what sticks, and eventually we walk away having paid 50€ each to hop on the next plane to Florence. Our existing return tickets would be honored. Onto the plane!

Then, once in Florence, we set out immediately to find ourselves a hostel, so we could ditch our heavy backpacks and cruise the city for a good afternoon, in preparation of going out at night. We had researched a few hostels while still in Germany, but hadn’t booked any rooms, because the phone numbers on the website didn’t seem to be working.

That’s right. We went to Florence, on a Saturday, without having booked any rooms. This proved to be a problem.

We visited every hostel we’d written down, and were told at each one that they were completely full. I learned how to say “completely full” in Italian pretty quickly:

We asked for recommendations for places to stay. We tried hotels, even though we didn’t think we could afford them. Every place was booked up solid through the weekend. One hotel clerk felt so bad for us that he said, “Moment. Internet.” He then sat down at a computer and proceeded to Google every hotel and hostel in Florence, and he printed us out a sheet, then even marked the ones he recommended we try first on our map. Quite a guy, him.

But unfortunately every single place was full. We’d now spent the entire day trekking around Florence, crossing the river many times, trying all neighbors, even far from the city center. It seemed pretty hopeless. We started to plan for sleeping outside, and even staked out a nice place by the river, where we thought we’d be left alone by the cops, and it wouldn’t be too cold.

While watching the sun set over the Arno, we pulled out our map and many lists of accommodations and triple checked that we’d hit everything and more. It was around this time we remarked that there was technically one hostel left, but it was directly adjacent to the train station, so it would absolutely be as packed as everything else. But it was getting dark and cold, and there would be food by the train station, so we figured we’d walk there.

Good thing we did. There were two beds left in the whole place, and we got them, for only 21€ per person. Sweetness. Free breakfast, free internet, the works. And the place was gorgeous, stocked with many pretty traveling English-speaking girls.

We were in a room of 20 beds or so (co-ed, oddly) and our room let out onto a rather beautiful courtyard, in stereotypically Italian fashion.

At the hostel, we ditched our bags and washed up. There we met a chap named Matt who was visiting from New York City. He works as a talent agent for voice actors, and apparently does pretty well for himself. He’d been in Florence most of the week already, so he knew some good places, and the three of us went out to dinner and enjoyed some nice Italian wine and succulent steak.

After dinner, we found a bar and got dizzy. Fred and I slept almost all day on Sunday, and awoke to find that Matt had already left for Rome.

See all Florence pics here.