Day 3, we made our way to Termini from Ottaviano for our journey to Florence and gosh it was dangerous to go on escalators with two checked in luggages plus one hand carry (we did not know that we had to have the luggage besides us on the same step, we were both putting the big luggages in front of us so it was always falling down in front of us at the threshold between escalator and landing). Also, when Mum got off the metro at Termini, the big luggage tripped her up or something so she ended up with a full leg stuck in the gap between the metro train and the platform. Luckily, the male passenger who got off before her saw that and pulled her straight up else she would have a forceful amputation of the leg! Thank you so much for the fast reaction and also thanks goes to the kind man who carried down the big luggages for us at one escalator/set of stairs at Termini. After that misadventure, I had a croissant for breakfast and Mum had nothing. As per usual, we arrived early and which platform our train arrived at appeared on the dot on the big departure screen 20 minutes earlier. I thought all the gates to platforms would open so moved leisurely down to the corresponding gate. Except that it never opened and our train had already left by the time I realised that. At the Italo ticket booth, I was forced to upgrade from Smart to Prime Business and forked out 70 Euro for 2 tickets from Rome to Florence. And how I rushed to the second train, not wanting to fork out another 70 Euro for a third one! I literally rushed from cabin 11 to cabin 3 along the platform and the attempt to port one checked in luggage up 3 steps was also an absolute killer. I didn’t even know how I managed and how Mum managed but we did! But Rome is definitely on my blacklist purely because I never wanted to experience the hassle of train travel from Termini ever again!
All the mishaps aside, we arrived safely at our Florence hotel at around 12pm and luckily, our room was already ready! We spent the rest of the day exploring Florence but only managed to find the Duomo, Baptistery of St. John and the Uffizi Gallery (we did walk past the cathedral near Santa Maria Novella but skipped it because it was just an old grey dilapidated building). To be honest, I followed a pointer to Ponte Vecchio but only managed to find the Uffizi Gallery. We had lunch at a place called Ristorante Bar at a square where Mum had tiramisu (which turned out to be in liquid form rather than cake form as we expected) and ice-cream (she did not feel like eating) and I forgot what I had, some light food. Then we had gelato at Vecchio Cioccolato e Gelato and there was a French young couple who lined up behind us who very kindly pointed us back towards the Duomo because we were thoroughly lost by then! In fact, the guy actually confirmed the route in Google maps by walking around himself. I think we were still muddled with the instructions after a while (we always do, after a while, it’s always did the person say left or right?) but we miraculously made it back. Dinner was at Pantarei Osteria Pizza & Grill which I had reserved. Mum had the squid ink noodles with shrimp and candied lemon peel which she was curious about and I probably had some salmon dish- fish was my go-to dish for Western cuisine. The noodles were okay but Mum said she was so-so about it too just like the carbonara.
Day 4 was supposed to be split between Pisa and Siena. Not much to be said about the trip to Pisa where we basically took pictures of the Leaning Tower and the building next to it and then caught our 11:30am train back to Florence. And here, a small hitch-up occurred: we were dropped at Firenze Ri-something, the outlying train station of Florence rather than back at Santa Maria Novella. We had lunch at a taglia pizza place (the pizza was pre-cut into rectangles and did not taste great because it was stored inside the counter for god knows how long already) before we bought a ticket back to Santa Maria Novella. That put us back at Florence at around 2pm rather than 12pm. And then when we were trying to find the bus to Siena, we ended up giving up because the bus company’s website always has bus routes where redundant stops are added (with the correct bus lines added in brackets underneath?!). Long story short, we ended up riding along the tram for the whole afternoon looking for bus stops for two separate bus lines (I had the thought of going to Piazza Michelangelo on the line 13 bus instead of Siena). I had booked dinner at Siena but obviously I had to cancel so we rode the tram to Santa Maria Novella (it had become our second homebase in Florence besides our hotel) for greater choice of dinner options. We ended up choosing a Chinese restaurant (I could see Mum was already a bit sick and tired of Italian cuisine)- not sure what its Italian name was but in Chinese its name meant the Big Capital Restaurant. We ordered two dishes- crabs and prawns, but the bill only came up to about 50 Euro. In general, I was underhitting the budget for lunch and dinner in Italy compared to my New Zealand trip. In fact, this became the theme for this entire trip except for Switzerland. But more on this later.
Day 5 was our big trip to Cinque Terre from Florence (it was 2.5 hours one way between Florence and La Spezia and then about half an hour between La Spezia and the last village of Cinque Terre, Monterosso al Mare). Now, Mum originally wanted to do it in reverse order, thinking that the majority of visitors would do the 5 fishing villages in chronological order, from the first one onwards. But I pointed out most of the hikers would start with the last village and visit them in reverse (something I found through Google search on Cinque Terre trips). So I came up with my own order which was 4, 5, then 1 and then maybe 3 if we had extra time. And doing it in that order (4,5,1) did help us to avoid the big crowds. To be honest, the fourth village was a bit too shabby for our taste and when seeing one of the pictures of a door taken there, Mum actually commented that we took a picture of a rubbish bin. Now, Monterosso al Mare, the biggest village, was a much different picture. It had a completely new look to it. We had a cheese and ham sandwich/focaccia (it was basically a sandwich with crunchy/deep fried bread) each for lunch. Then we hopped the train back to village 1 (Riomaggiore) where the road into the village was so steep that I was forced to find a different way back (we usually backtrack since I’m direction blind but am forced to be the guide due to language barriers) where the way down would not be as steep. After the 3 villages, we decided to call it a day in order to not miss our train from La Spezia back to Florence. And lucky we were not greedy because the train from village 1 back to La Spezia was delayed. For dinner I again reserved but we had no success finding the restaurant I booked because we were befuddled by a street where the numbers jumped around (at first it was going ever higher and then it jumped around to a small number!). So we went back to Santa Maria Novella and tried to find the Chinese restaurant where we had dinner yesterday. But what do you know that we could not even find the street with lots of restaurants and ended up having dinner at Burger King. And that concluded our 3 days in Florence.
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