Amazing trip into the City

At the top of San Miniato al Monte, looking out over Florence. The big orange-ish dome is il Duomo, and the other tall tower is Palazzo Vecchio!
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Honestly, Florence is an amazing city.  Today we went up a huge hill to San Miniato al Monte, it's a big church on a hill, more or less.  Anyways, at the top you can see all of Florence, it's quite impressive.  So we walked all the way down to the city center, and today was the Epiphany, so the streets were all crowded, and everyone was out for a big parade, which ended up statrting about 2 hours late, I guess I really am in Italy.  But it was so fun to walk around and look at all the people and shops!  We crossed Ponte Vecchio, which is the old bridge in Florence that crosses l'Arno (river), and is real old, hence the word vecchio!).  So the story behind Ponte Vecchio is it used to be where all the butchers had their shops so the blood could drain into the river, but somewhere down the line, a principe (prince) wasn't feeling the dirtiness, so he made all the butchers leave, and all the jewelers move in.  So the area around there is rife with jewelers and leather shops, amazing!  Then we saw this parade, which is a really big deal, and was real neat to watch.  It was basically a bunch of people in procession, that were from all the old city-states, and they all had different "clans", so to speak, and they played drums and had flags and things, and it was a different clan after another.  It was cool though! We saw il Duomo, which is seriously gigantic.  The thing is just huge.  Oh, and there are still Christmas lights everywhere, so it is fun to walk around when it's sorta dusky!(with a group with a male of course!)  Then we just kinda dinked around Florence, attempting to make our way back to lo stazione, where we got hit on by skeezy italian men.  lol  We walked through an open air market (omg, leather and hats and gloves and everything galore!) and I saw this really funny mukluk furry hat, so of course I stop and act like a complete dork and try it on.  So we all stop, and the man, Roberto, is laughing at me, and says "oh bella, I will help you find a hat." so the man outfits me in a cute brown hat and fixes my hair, and he has been to Minnesota, and all the cool things, turns out he lives in Sesto about a block down the street from us.  His wife is from Hawaii.  Small world.  So of course I had to buy the hat!  :)  After an exhausting day we came home and had an amazing slice of pizza con funghi e prosciutto (mushroom and ham), weird combo but delicious!  We were all so tired we just sat in the basement, played a little guitar and talked and watched a movie.  lame I know, but the whole 7 hour adjustment thing is hard to get used to!  Ciao Ciao!      

Epiphany?!