We only booked one night at the hostel so that meant we had to check out by 10:00. Since we planned on staying more nights we were allowed to keep our stuff in a secure storage room they had at the hostel so we wouldn’t have to carry our backpacks around all day before check in at 15:00.

Nate and I walked the streets and were just dumbfounded at how beautiful the city is. Our hostel was about a half mile from the train station which is located right at the heart of the historic part of the city. It’s quite beautiful exploring a new city. You don’t even care if you get lost. If you’re walking down a street and something to the left looks cool you just go and hope that later you can find your way back. Well, you always find your way back, how long it takes to find your way back is a different story.

Every building in central Florence is a skyscraper’s height but much more beautiful and rustic. Every building you look up to see feels like you’re in the front row of the movies, but the show is worth the neck pain the next day. All the streets and sidewalks are extremely narrow and one way. It makes sense why Fiat’s and mopeds are really popular in Italy. Every street seemed to have a pizzeria, gelateria (with the best gelato ever), a bar, and a clothing or shoe store (from your average clothing stores to some of the largest sized designer stores I’ve ever seen), and multiple restaurants with really cool outside seating areas to enjoy your meals listening to the city.

But as we’re walking the first day we stumble upon this tower that looks bigger than the space needle. So we stop on the street to take a picture. Then we take 20 steps forward to the intersection to see the tower was just a small part of one of the most beautiful structures I’ve ever seen, Del Duomo. We made our way around, shocked that this building was just standing there knowing it was built centuries ago. We stumbled across a line where you could pay 15 Euro to make it to the top and see Florence from the sky. Turns out the wait was 3.5 hours and we needed to figure out how to get back to our hostel to check in and it was getting time to decide where our first Italian meal would be.

We found a pizzeria with hundreds of pizzas on display in the window. 3 Euro for a slice, why not? I got a slice with sausage and something that looked like spinach but I have no clue what it really was. Nate got a salami Gorgonzola calzone. Both delicious. Mine was a thin piece of pizza with no sauce, just olive oil and the first bite was salty goodness from the meat to the cheese. I was in love again, and she wasn’t Australian.

We finessed our way through the city looking for anything familiar to make our way back to the hostel to check in, change our clothes and take a few minutes to sit down and rest our legs. We got to our room and there was a nice Aussie guy who was getting ready for a tour of the leaning tower of Piazza, so we spoke briefly and he was on his way. We unpacked, made our beds, locked our stuff in our lockers and took a little nap before goin back out on the town. I messaged our friend who lives in Florence and he told us to meet him at a bar around 22:00. So we decided if we were going to be drinking we might as well eat.

We stumbled across a restaurant with an outdoor patio not too far from the hostel and decided to eat there. The nice part about the restaurants in Europe is most of them have a menu outside the restaurant so if it looks good and reasonably priced you can stay. If not, you can keep walking without having already sat down making the staff feel like you’re about to eat. The shitty part is when you want to read a menu but the host or hostess is trying their hardest to get you in when you’re just looking.

We got menus, ordered a bottle of red wine and our respective dishes and waited to indulge. I ordered seafood pasta with clams and muscles and it was delicious, bon, as my waiter corrected me in Italian. Nate ordered a pizza that turned out to have French fries and hot dogs on it. I guess that’s what you get when you read a menu mostly in Italian. He wasn’t too pleased at the whole thing but it wasn’t too bad if you ate the French fries separately. The wine was delicious. Wine isn’t my preferred drink typically, but I’ve always bought cheap American wine that tastes like chemicals. This wine did not, it was Tuscany wine that tasted like grapes and was quite pleasant. We were pleased with our investment and went back to the hostel to change and hit the bar.

We arrived at the bar about the same time as our friend and he threw a beer in our hands and said kill this before you come in, I have to pee bad. Once we went in we caught up with our friend and as the bar got busier we met more people. It was 5 Euro for a beer and a shot with every beer you buy, fair price. We were both pretty full from dinner so we alternated who drank the beer and took the shot. As the booze started flowin a flip cup tournament came into play and we ended up being on a team with a vulgar Scottish lady and a guy from Ohio.

We continued to drink with our teammates until it was our time to go. Best 3 out of 5 and Nate was the liability on the table. They switched off who started each round and the round Nate was first the other team finished before he flipped his cup, it was really funny. The Scot ripped him a new one saying things I would never say to anyone in her harsh accent. It was hilarious.

After we drank more and met more people we were on our way to the club. The bar was dominated by Americans but the club was a solid mix of Americans and Italians. It was a small club with short ceilings so the music was louder than it needed to be. To get in the club it cost 10 euro and that included two drinks. I ordered a gin and tonic and they poured it stiff. All gin, no tonic really. I was already fairly drunk and that drink was set to put me over. Nate, myself, and our new friends danced the night away and didn’t end up leaving the club until 3:00 and made it back to the hostel by 3:30.