11/25/04

After a 22 hour bus ride from Amsterdam to Florence italy and going through customs 3 times(france, swiss, and italy, switzerland took an hour and a half!)Man they are serous about their customs now. Angie was here in 2001 and they barely checked anywhere for anything. But now they dont mess around. When we got the the boarder of belgum and france both caleb and I got physically ssearched, our bags and asked us tons of questions, took our passports. We were scared. Compared to Amsterdam, florence is balmy. When we spepped out of the bus we were so happy to feel ground under our feet after being ona bus for so long. Its funny because people around here are wearing their winter coats and scarfs. We were wearing our tshirts sweating. At first anyway. We found the hostel by foot(it only took us 2 hours with our fully loaded packs, my bright idea beacause I wanted to bet a layout of the city. We found out later that you can get 4 hours on a city bus for 3.50 euro live and learn) we walked back into the city and called our parents for thanksgiving and then we had our thanksgiving dinner of pizza and pasta. Viva Italia! It was delish! We went bacl to the hostel and met a nice couple from Australia. Their names areKate and James and they come from a place near Melbourne. They are cuper cool and wwe have decided to site see with them through Florence tomorrow. Neither Caleb or Angie got much sleep on the bus so we were going on next to no sleep for 36 hours. We were exhausted, but when we got back to our tent area we had laid everything out to dry in the sun. However, at night in florence there is a tramendous amout of mist in moisture so all of our stuff was drenched. When we went to pitch the tent the ground was so hard that we had to use a rock to pound the stakes in. Angie had a breakdown at that point. So we got a laundry token and dried all the wet stuff and then went to bed in our travelling circus tent.