Today was a day when we decided to relax a bit from the hectic schedule of the previous 5 days. We did have tickets to the Galleria dell'Accademia in Florence where the famous statue of David by Michelangelo is displayed. We woke up late and finished breakfast. When we went outside, we found that the cloudy, drizzly weather was still persisting. We walked past a street market (Mercato Centrale) to our destination but when we got there, we found it to be closed. Usually, most museums are closed in Italy on Mondays, but I had specifically checked online when I booked the tickets and the ticket printout clearly showed the date and time to be correct. The lady at the museum was impatient and rude and kept insisting that the museum was closed. We had no option but to return to the hotel. I decided to complain, so I called the number on the tickets. There was a slight wait and then a lady answered the phone and asked me details of the ticket. That’s when I realized that the tickets I had purchased were actually for a museum of a very similar name in Venice (Gallerie dell'Accademia). I told the lady I would call back and hung up. That was 70 Euros gone down the drain, unfortunately. Anyway, that meant we had the whole morning to ourselves. Sahana and Sneha dozed off on their bed while Ashwin caught up on his email and I started updating my blog and transferring / tagging photos. I also did some research to find the best restaurants in Florence that were not too expensive and found a place called All'Antico Vinaio. From the reviews in TripAdvisor, I got the impression that they also had vegetarian sandwiches on their menu. So, we decided to go there for lunch. It was in a small alley near the Palazzo Vecchio and because of its popularity, there were two “branches” of the store across the road from each other. Both had long lines of eager patrons and we joined one of them. Initially, we were confused by the two places with identical names but when we saw an employee carry meat and provisions from one store to the other, we realized that they must be part of the same operation and continued to wait in the line we were in. There were a lot of pigeons flying about looking for handouts from the customers and the customers were obliging by throwing out tidbits. The pigeons were quite bold and would frequently fly very close to us.
After about 15 min of waiting, our turn finally came. We told the guy behind the counter that we were vegetarians and we wanted 4 sandwiches with no meat. He immediately understood, nodded his head vigorously and started preparing our order. He spread some kind of sauce that looked suspiciously meat-y and slopped on a mix of roasted / sauteed veggies and some cheese and other stuff. Initially, Sahana wanted her’s to be made with a wrap not bread but we weren’t able to make the guy understand what we meant by “wrap”. He thought “wrap” meant that we wanted to have the order packed for takeaway, so he packed all our sandwiches, put them in a plastic bag and gave it to us. Anyway, we paid for our order and decided to find a quiet place to sit and eat them. The road we were on was very narrow, so we stood on the sidewalk of the road that went along the river and unpacked our sandwiches. The bread was hard (which we didn’t mind) but somehow, the sandwiches weren’t really as tasty as we were hoping they would be. Ashwin could finish about 3/4ths of his, I could barely finish half of mine, Sneha didn’t even bother to try hers and Sahana also hardly ate a bit of her sandwich. We packed up whatever was remaining and headed back to the hotel. The hectic schedule of the previous few days had started catching up with me and I was feeling really tired by the time we reached the hotel. I just flopped down on the bed, closed my eyes and went to sleep for about 2 hours. In the evening, we decided to try out a vegetarian restaurant and also do some shopping for souvenirs, etc. I found a couple of vegetarian restaurants which seemed fairly walkable, so we set out. The first stop was the main marketplace in Florence (Mercato Centrale). The shops were almost closing down and we were disappointed that we started a bit too late from the hotel. Still, I asked one guy who was putting away things if he could show some purses to Sneha / Sahana. He agreed and the girls then took over the process of examining, comparing, bargaining and finally buying one purse. With that task accomplished, we set out in search of the vegetarian restaurant (Il Vegetariano). It wasn’t as easy to find as we had thought. The streets became a bit deserted and shady. We started thinking that this was probably a bad idea but we kept going anyway. Finally, after a much longer walk than we had planned, we came to the street where Il Vegetariano was supposed to be and we found it to be shut down (for good, we think).
Disappointed, we made our way back to try our luck at the other vegetarian place I’d seen in Google Maps. But, this turned out to be a regular restaurant with a few vegetarian options on the menu which didn’t look too appealing. The smell from the restaurant next door was also overpowering and unappetizing, so we decided to find one of our regular pizzeria / ristorantes for dinner. We headed back towards the Florence cathedral because we knew that there were several restaurants there. We found a restaurant we’d not been to before and had another heavy dinner (pizza for Ashwin and me; pasta for Sneha). Sahana was still feeling full from the lunch in the afternoon, so she just took a little bit from each of our plates.
End of day 6. A relatively light day from a sight-seeing perspective, but we still walked quite a lot.
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