Old Farts

I had every intention of trying to check out the night life in Florence. After all, this trip is supposed to be where idery meets opportunity. Now, when you start your morning off with a few cups of cappuccino (do remember I do not drink coffee), pounds of some of the best carbs in the world, liters of wine and aperol spritzes, then add miles of walking, photo taking (and photo bombing) and even more drinking, by the time 8pm rolls around, all I wanna do is pass out. But... When in Rome! (I realize that I'm not actually in Rome, but let's not get caught up in semantics. You get my point).

Our second day in Florence was filled with all of the above. One of the most amazing things about this town is you can literally walk everywhere. To this westerner, the dots on the map looked very far away and my immediate reaction was 'what bus do we take?' So color me surprised when we walked the majority of the city in half the day, stopping for gelato (again, should be had at every meal) and vino whenever possible. I had the best aperol spritz from Cafe del Borgo, which was a recommendation by a friend and is now one of my favorite places (the fly server, Marco, could have something to do with it as well). Marco told us about this great panini and vino place around the corner, All'Antico Vinaio. It was ridiculous. The picture speaks for itself.

So the moral of this very long story is this. Even after all of this over indulgence, I was still determined to not be an old fart and at least make an attempt to throw some shapes on the dance floor, Italian style (is that what the kids are saying? I don't think I used that right). After a long nap and almost changing our minds multiple times, we sucked it up and went to the local discoteca around midnight. We'd been told that this place is where all the young American girls go to get hit on by Italian men (Mr. Traveller saw much potential in this situation). As soon as we walked outside, I knew that this would be a bust. It was a Tuesday night, I was exhausted and MT was trying to thwart off a cold. Nothing good could come of this. But again, we trudged on. We trudged the half a mile over to Club Twice, only to stand outside and see 5 people inside... Three of which most definitely worked there. The only thing left to do was turn around and walk right back to the hostel. We thought we might stop at one of the bars on the way back and at least attempt to salvage this outing, but as we approached our last option, we paused, looked at the folks standing around and kept on walking. We arrived back at the hostel approximately 25 min after we left. Sometimes there is just no fighting the inevitable.