In the morning I made toast in the kitchen before heading out with this French girl I'd met the night prior. She's biking from Brittany to Athens, mostly camping on the side of the road on her way, but is making a few hostel stops in the cities along her path. She'd been to Turin before, so she knew some cool squares and piazzas that we stopped by. A bit later she wanted to try Italian pizza, so I found a well-reviewed place on Google Maps and we headed over. She spoke pretty good Italian, so I let her handle everything with the guy behind the counter. He was really nice and kept giving us little extra cookies or calzone pieces. The pizza was quite good, although I don't think it was really that different from what you'd find at a nice place back in the States. One of the slices we got apparently had some sort of water buffalo mozzarella, which you certainly wouldn't find back home, but if I'm being honest it didn't taste any different from the cow stuff you'd get at Market Basket.

I said goodbye to her after exchanging contact info - since she's going to Athens, there are pretty good odds our paths cross again. I got on the bus soon after and was once again dismayed to find the driver telling me I couldn't bring my backpack into the cabin - but this time he didn't make me pay extra to stow it below. The ride itself wasn't at all what I'd expected. For the first leg of things it was pretty standard Italian countryside, but once we got closer to Genoa the terrain became very hilly. I'd somewhat expected this, but what I hadn't expected was that the cities would all be built into the sides of these hills and that the hills themselves would be covered in such dense foliage. The buildings got more run down and sad looking, and because of the steep contours of the slopes, the highway was built largely as either tunnels or bridges so as to avoid winding too intensely around the terrain. We spent a lot of time looking down over these villages in the hillside from our elevated highway, and the impression they gave was one of a much poorer country, perhaps Brazil or somewhere in southeast Asia. Not at all what I had expected to find in Italy. Genoa itself looked cool and I would've liked to spend a night there, but it wasn't in the cards.

The bus seems to have been barred from entering too close to Florence city center, so I had to take a tram all the way downtown from the outermost fringe. I got settled in my dorm room, met my roommates - two Mormon sisters from Utah and a Korean guy - and then went out to meet up with some hostelworld people at the Irish pub across the street. Almost everyone I met here was American, strangely enough, but they were nice. At one point this Slavic guy sat down with us with some alcohol he'd brought in from the outside, so the staff told him to empty it out. He didn't take take kindly to this at all and started shoving anyone who got near him while yelling about how everyone else was being so aggressive. It wasn't a true bar fight, but it was exciting all the same. The bartenders gave us free drinks to apologize for the inconvenience. When they closed around 2, a few of us decided to go out and hunt down food. The only option for this seemed to be the local McDonald's, which was conveniently located around the corner from an incredible old cathedral. It was enormous and of a scale that I'm not used to seeing.

No idea what I'll do today because I don't really know what's in Florence - I suppose that's to be found out.