Monday, May 14, 2012

Big Batch O' Pictures

I haven't been busy, I haven't been on vacation, I haven't been kidnapped.  But I have been 'down', I guess you could say.  That's the only true reason I can come up with to explain my absence from this blog.

I'm going to be 100% honest right now: I miss home.  Not just my family, or my friends, or my old bedroom, but shopping at American stores and eating at American restaurants and driving through American neighborhoods.  Germany is a great and beautiful country but it's impossible to convince myself that I'm not on a foreign continent away from most familiar things, and that gets to you after a while (or at least gets to me).  Thank you Jesus, though, that I have been blessed with great friends and neighbors, a loving, ginger husband and the cutest little (don't tell me he's growing up!) pup.  As I sit here, he's piled up three toys and is attacking them.  He's very beastly; the stuffed squirrel stands no chance.


He doesn't turn his head, he lifts an eyebrow.  Very sneaky.


Sooooo the hubby and I went to Italy, right?  And we took some pictures.  Well, maybe a tad bit more than "some", but "some" have got to be shared!

We spent a total of ten days in Italy, two of those on a plane, and we went to Pisa, Florence and Rome.  It was a once in a lifetime trip that we feel very blessed to have taken, and I will be totally honest in saying that we will never go back to Italy except for Venice.  Movies lie when showing a romantic scene in Tuscan Italy, ya know, with the windswept hair of a beautiful Italian maiden and she's wearing a flowy, feminine dress while picking olives and eating pasta.  Lies.  It's not much of a fairy tale land, even in the small Tuscan towns which really can be beautiful but were still covered in graffiti and still made us feel dirty.  However, like I said, the trip was a complete blessing!  Like, for real?  We got to see that and be there?  Oh, yes.





 Isn't the tower gorgeous?  There's so many details in the stone work that is impossible to see in a text book. And even my dearest husband, who'd rather do something a little more "fun" than see another old building with some kind of history that you can read about somewhere, thought the tower was cool.  We also traveled by train to Florence and Rome, which was awesome and cheap (like 24 euro for all of our tickets), so that neat, scallop designed plaza is a picture outside the Pisa termini.
















Florence made our whole trip.

Those lattes?  Yeah, they were the ish.  This girl loves some good espresso but NEVER did I imagine an espresso drink of mostly milk would be so delicious!

We really only spent a morning in Pisa, which is really all you need, before taking the train to Florence, and the whole city was just a cool experience.  We stayed in the spare bedroom of the nicest guy, Roberto, who became our weird Italian uncle during our three days there.  We saw the statue of David by Michelangelo (favorite!), the Boboli gardens (all those pictures are on disposable cameras because my camera went on strike for a day), Ponte Vecchio (that bridge up there), had a night out for drinks and free tapas.  We had too much time in Florence and ended up walking in a lot of circles, but it was perfect time for talking, holding hands, finding excuses to stop for espresso and making jokes about chafing....don't ask about that last one, poor husband.

Oh, P.S., the reason there's smoke on the first picture of the Duomo is because there were Easter fireworks.  Sweet, right?


To cross off my bucket list?  Making some legit pasta in Rome.  My hubby is a pasta connoisseur and even he loved it!
I couldn't include all of our pictures from Rome (the Spanish steps, the Borghese gardens,the Trevi fountain, the Pantheon, etc.) because that was when my camera was still revolting and we had to resort to disposables.
By the time we were in Rome, we were so ready to go home, so ready to leave Italy and never step foot in the country again.  The rain didn't really help, but we trucked through and made what we could of our time there.  Don't regret a thing.
Ok, well the only thing I regret about our whole time in Italy is not getting a look at Michelangelo's David's butt.  The hubby just was R-E-A-D-Y to get out of that museum and thought my request to be a little...too much.  Can't blame him, but I still want a look at that butt.



1 comment: