Since the previous night was so late, this morning was too. I found myself with a lack of motivation to do anything despite really wanting to explore the city. When I did, I found that most of the main attractions were totally booked up, so this ended up as primarily a walking day. That's totally ok - Florence is beautiful. Probably the most attractive city I've been to thus far, even if not my overall favorite. The narrow cobblestone streets, hilly terrain south of the river, and the skyline dominated by cathedrals and clock towers makes for the most romanticized version of Italian life I could possibly have imagined. I roamed around all day taking it in, including a visit to that cathedral from the previous night, apparently called the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore. It was here that I began to appreciate a cost of Florence's beauty - the inescapable crowds. While I wasn't especially desperate to get up close to the building again, I don't know that I could've fought my way through the dense throngs of people had I wanted to. Seeing it at 3:15 AM seems to have been the right move. The same was true at most of the most interesting parts of the city. In the evening, someone tried to organize a hostelworld meetup at the top of one of the hills overlooking the city. It was really stunning, especially with the sunset, but it seemed that everyone else in the city had the same idea and it was completely impossible to find anyone. Just getting into position to take a picture took an incredible amount of patience and determination as I navigated through everyone else trying to do the same. After giving up on finding the other people, I started walking back to the hostel with my eyes open for a restaurant along the way.

I found a few places on reddit that seemed affordable and high quality, but they were all totally packed. Lines out the door, in some cases. I retreated to the hostel and ended up getting some Chinese noodles a bit later. It felt somewhat blasphemous to be eating non-Italian noodles in Tuscany, but at least this place wasn't totally packed to the gills and was relatively cheap. After, I went back to the room with plans of going to find some people from hostelworld at a bar. I found my Korean roommate there and we talked for a bit. His English isn't very good, but it's enough that he can communicate as long as you give him time. He had lots of questions about life in America. "Is it true that you can't go outside your house after 10 PM because of gang violence?" I offered to have him come along to the bar, so we headed out together. He showed up wearing Crocs and extremely baggy jeans - complete Chad energy. At the bar I met some other people from Boston (identified by how excited they were to hear "Sweet Caroline") and hung out for a little while. After the third time someone went up to sing "Mr. Brightside", we headed back across the city. I again found myself much preferring Florence by night.

Since I didn't do any real attractions today, I'll offload some of that sightseeing on tomorrow.