Friday 1 April 2016

Rapporto di Caffè - Day 11

After the busy day yesterday, today is a superslow morning, I'm doing a bicycle tour around Florence at 11 and Sharon and Paul are doing a Tuscan cooking class at 10 so absolute no hurry. The bells in the distance woke me at 7.30 today.

I finally got out to get my coffee at about 8.30 and stopped at an ATM to stock up on cash monies as I was running low. Waiting to use the machine I looked around and all the street vendors were setting up for the day. Nothing starts early here. Interesting observation about the cash machines here, you do all your selections first, then just before it spits out your hard earned, it asks for the PIN number, opposite to home.

Got my euros and headed for my favourite cafe and had one coffee at the bar, and the ordered two takeaways. Different barista today, but his coffee was just as good as the lady who made mine the last few days.

Headed back to the apartment and of course made good use of the nook and settled in on the comfy lounge with a nice cool breeze coming in the window to enjoy my second coffee and write this blog entry. Ah, bliss, it doesn't get much better than this, Coffee, Tuscany and Internet....

Im doing the bike tour today, bikes are really popular here, not quite Dutch like popular, but they are everywhere. Not much traffic on the roads in central Florence and what traffic there is moves very slowly and is very patient. I wasn't keen on doing something like this is Rome, but Florence is a completely different story

Vendors setting up for the morning 


My "at bar" coffee

Marvel again at the sheer perfectness of the nooks placement. I will miss the nook when we move on to the next city


When I was paying for today's coffee, the lady in front of me paid for her breakfast with a €50 note. Italy has a high crime problem in heavy tourist areas, so it's no real shock that they would have counterfeit currency issues too (as we do at home with the A$50). To combat this the cafe had a small machine he fed the note through that checked it was a legitimate note. He didn't bother with the crumpled fiver that I paid for mine with. Since we are on the subject of fakes, this little shrub in the apartment foyer that I liked the look of ? It's a fake.....