America 1 + America 2 take a trip: DAY 26: This town ain't big enough for the two of us....

So we went in search of a smaller one! Following a brisk jog to the bike rental place (we left late, and had a time limit), we hopped on our neon yellow 'cruiser bikes', noted for their inner city usefulness. To quote the company, 'perfect to bike Florence, but not as good to go outside the city!'--naturally, we headed for the hills. As we attempted to leave the tourist infested area, which winds through many suboptimal roads, we discovered that whilst these bikes had wider tires than those in Ireland, the tires were a bit flat and, to my amusement, my bell rang every time I hit a significant bump—not to mention, the (fake) chrome on my back tire rattled as if it would fall off at any given moment as well. JJ, given the bike with the handle basket, was also in an interesting situation, as she got to carry the backpack with two water bottles, lunch, cameras, phones, and the wallet, which made the already dire balance even worse.

Following my index card of directions from Google, we followed the roads out of town towards Fiesole in search of the ancient Roman Theatre in the Tuscan hillside town. This time, the directions were nearly perfect, and lead us to a picturesque back road for a good chunk of the trip...butttt we should have crossed our fingers, because what one cannot interpret from driving directions is the steepness of grade along the route. Prior to our cute road, we had climbed a decent hill, but thought nothing of it. However, when we turned onto what I thought was to be the final stretch of our ride, the road dropped off sharply into a valley, and rose at an ever greater angle following the suicidal downhill slope. The pictures really don't give a good sense of how steep it was... or how poorly our brakes worked!

BUT don't fret, because clearly, we are still alive. I survived the heart attack JJ gave me, flying down the hill, and we both survived an hour long uphill trek, pushing our bikes the majority of the way. Even on the parts of the road that we could have easily ridden our bikes, the road was much too curved for it to be safe—Italian drivers don't differ much from the Greeks and take the corners quite fast. Oh, and I forgot to mention that Google maps may have given us valid directions this time, but that was counteracted by the lack of visible street signs, which, nevertheless, led to me asking some old men at the end of a country road outside of Fiesole how to get to the Roman Theater. Bad news: I don't speak Italian, so I had no clue what they actually said to me. Good news: the Italians speak with lots of hand motions, so I managed to understand that we had already passed the theater and had to go back into Fiesole to find it.

A few minutes later, we pulled up to the front of the archaeological site, and guess what? We got in for freeeee! Today happened to be included in their 'Week of Culture' or something like that, and they had opened the gates to visitors free of charge. Good timing! We locked out bikes to the posts and went in. JJ scoffed at the size of the theater, as Epidavrus had set a pretty high standard, and she muttered rude comments about the Romans under her breath. Actually, she just stood at the top and stated, 'The Greeks were better,' and walked away to find the other part of the ruins. In my explorations of the theater, to no surprise, I managed to walk into some stinging nettle. Seriously???

The view from the ruins was spectacular and the area was pretty small, so we made the rounds and ate our lunches, hoping that we would beat the clocks back into Florence. Remember how I said we had a time limit? Registration for the Fall 2011 courses at Cornell opened to the entire junior class at exactly 1.00 (7.00 EST), and marks a day of dread for all Cornellians in my class. And one of my courses only had one seat left after the senior enrollment period last week. To ensure my status as a full time student in the coming school year, we had to be back at the hostel before 1.00. I can't really convey the full extent of the situation's urgency... but, being on vacation and all, we left at 12.20ish to complete the journey which had taken us an hour and a half originally. I was planning on pulling the pity card in the event that any of my classes were already full, and I really wanted that one final seat in CSS2940.

Fortunately, since our original path had been almost entirely uphill, the descent to Florence went rather fast! We managed to pull up in front of the hotel with mere seconds to spare, and I sprinted up the stairs, abandoning JJ with the bikes (a bit self centered, I must admit). I even managed to log on at 12.59, but when I clicked 'Add Course' for CSS2940, the one seat had been occupied...

Lame. Moving on. We had planned to spend the afternoon at two of Florence's many museums, notably the Galeria Uffizi and the Natural History Museum of Florence. After I completed my registration, we cleaned up and checked the hours of operation for both. Just our luck, Uffizi isn't open on Mondays and the Natural History Museum closes at 1.00. At a loss for better ideas, we opted to spend the next two hours lounging on the rooftop balcony again.

After returning the bikes, we wandered the streets looking for a kebab restaurant—these seemed to litter the streets we had travelled for the two previous days, but since we actually wanted to find one, there were none in sight. Since we seem to enjoy walking in random directions so much, our ventures took us back towards the river where we had crossed the night before in search of the elusive A Casa Mia restaurant, and just as we had remembered, we found a kebab shop that suited JJ's liking. After finishing our rather large kebabs, we decided that we should return to the dessert shop we had visited the night before and once again, we bought too many but ate them all...and washed it all down with gelato from another shop. If we thought the taxi driver in Athens was bad, we clearly underestimated the power of hidden prices at Florence gelaterias...

Needless to say, we paid three times as much for our gelato as we had been quoted, but enjoyed it nevertheless. Upon our return to the hostel, we both tried to drink more water than our stomachs could handle and have miserably retired to our beds prematurely. I am trying to return to my typical Durham schedule of pajamas before sunset and have been quite successful tonight!

JJ, also in pajamas, would also like everyone to know that she has also been abused by the sun and mauled by small flying vampires, known commonly as mosquitoes. So far it's 6-2, they are winning.