Florence

 We drove from Venice to Florence and went through the rolling countryside, going through so many tunnels it was unbelievable. We checked into Riva lofts which was our free night from IHG. This place looks very exclusive and it’s almost too bad that will only be here for one night. They have bikes for the Hotel gets to use so we biked off into the city. The city was very crowded and we both remarked that we heard many American voices here. We thought about going into two churches but one was closed and one had an unbelievably long line. Riding on the bike made me feel very European except that I wasn’t too crazy about all the crowds. We got to the academia galleria and saw Michelangelos David. The statue was carved between 1501 and 1504 and was originally intended to go top a dome, but turned out to be large too large to be lifted up. It really is quite detailed as you can see David’s muscles and veins. The museum is also filled with other renaissance art Which is truly unbelievable as they are so old dating back centuries. We rode some more on our bikes and went to a park outside a fortress. The fortress is a convention center and not when you can visit. I found it interesting to watch a table full of Italian women who are sitting there laughing and talking and drinking I got the feeling this was a regular activity for them. Another interesting person we saw on our ride was a man in a small red car who is feeding the pigeons and the pigeons were coming into his window. People are always interesting. We went to our Pastamania class which was about a 20 minute walk from our hotel in a light rain. The majority of the class was made up of young people and it’s interesting to me how many young people are taking advantage of traveling the world. The class was led by young Italian woman named Argentina and what times was hard to understand, but definitely loved her job. Rolling out a small ball of dough turned out to be longer than I even thought. We made three types of pasta; ravioli, fettuccine and cappeloni. After several hours we sat down to our meal with the past this we had made. The tomato sauce and the two cheese fillings had already been prepared and that’s what we filled our dough with. It was delicious. Hopefully we can replicate some of the process at home.