26th Sept - 1st Oct - Florence, Italy Part 1

On the morning of 26th, we took an inter-city train from Termini to Firenze (Florence) via Chiusi. Few days prior, we have bought our train ticket from the ticket office after having some fun operating the self-service ticket machines. You can check the trains available after entering the date, the departure and arrival destination. You can also view the type of train available and the price for the journey selected and check if you see the word 'Amica', then it meant there's discount available. But during the course of browsing through the various combination of time, type of train etc (going forward and backwards through the pages), often we had the machine's system 'hang', so we need to find another machine to play with. After confirming the details of our journey, we went to the ticket office to buy the tickets (you can actually buy the tickets from the machine). The ticket costs €15.80 per person, which is very much cheaper than taking the EuroRail. One thing about the train ticket here is that there will not be any time stamped on the ticket itself so you need to validate the ticket (at an orange box on the platform) before you board the train (which we found out on our journey from Florence to Venice) .

After about 3.5 - 4 hours, we arrived at Florence. We weren't quite sure so we asked another Asian lady who is getting ready to go down. She confirmed it and also gave us (first-timers to Florence) advice to look out for the Gypsy woman and their babies. Following the Emerald Field hostel's instruction, we found our way to the hostel reception, but we are only checking in there as our private double room is situated in a private apartment some 5 minutes walk away. The location of the apartment is very good, there are 2 cafe restaurants down stairs, a bus station in front and the Accademia gallery is just round the corner. The apartment is pretty huge with 3 seperate rooms. The whole decor is simple but nice. There are also several guide books about Florence available in the apartment.

After settling down and taking a rest, we went out for a stroll cum exploration. We came to the San Lorenzo market and were quickly attracted to this bustling leather market. The overall market area is quite huge and is crowded with tourists shopping and bargaining with the sellers. Leather jackets, leather gloves, handbags, hats, pashminas, quirky souvenirs, this is definitely a heaven for shoppers. I am not so much into shopping but I still enjoyed it a lot as there's so much colors and objects that kept me clicking away on my D80.

Both Bel and I preferred Florence to Rome, as quite different from Rome, the tourist attractions here are relatively close-by, making it rather compact and dynamic. Hence we did almost all our exploration by foot throughout our stay here. It's one good walking city.