All that cultural crap

.We arrived in Florence a little sad to leave Cinque Terre...it is my favorite place right now. I wish I could go back. Right now we are in Roma but spent 3 days in Florence (too long) and a day and a half in Venice. Florence was fine, our hostel was huge and we ran into 2 people that went to high school with Julia...random. We went to the Galleria Dell Accademia and waited in line for 40 mins to see the statue David. Julia and I felt like we were in line at the club...the bouncer at the front wouldnt let us in even though we were at the front and kept letting in tour groups or the "vips" who had advance tickets. It was worth the wait cause it is amazing..a lot larger than I expected. Other than that the rest of the gallery was full of Jesus paintings and Ive seen so many now that they all look the same. We walked past the Duomo which is the 4th largest Catherdral in the world. It was very impressive and painted bright colors. We didnt go in cause the line up was HUGE. Thats what I learned about Florence there is a line up for everything! The best part of the time spent in Florence was going to the Palazzo Vecchio It was the original city hall and still is. We did a secret passages tour and got to find secret entrances and stairways that the old rulers used. They have an amazingly large room that is still used today for city hall and the ceiling has tons of huge paitings on it. We went in between the ceiling and roof to see how they held the heavy gold frames and the ceiling and roof up. It was actually quite interesting.

The next day Julia and I were feeling like we still needed some cultural crap (I like to call it that now) and wait almost 2 hours to get into this art gallery!! We got there at 830 in the morning! It was such a waste of time...we vowed to not go to any more art galleries for awhile. It was mostly Jesus paintings again...and then we thought the Angel painting from Rahphel were there but not. (False advertising) and I only recognized about 3 paintings. The "last supper" painting wasnt even there even though they had a DiVinci exhibit. .
After that we hiked up to the top of a hill and saw a great view of the city and enjoyed a healthy lunch of chips and beer while the gross pigeons kept trying to steal them away.

Venice was a lot nicer than Florence but unfortunatly has way more pigeons. I sort have developed a fear of them because there are CRAZY! They sell feed in the markets and dumb people go around feeding them. They fly anywhere and everywhere and dont care about taking people out so there is a lot of ducking involved when walking close to them. Besides the pigeons Venice was pretty. There were no cars around and the bus was a boat! We toured a couple glass showrooms and saw how they make it. They have really nice glass things We didnt do cultural crap but we did go to the Palazzo Ducale. It was the official residence of the Doges (the head leaders of Venice) We toured around their rooms....the Senate rooms and the Prison!! We walked over the bridge of sighs which was named from Cassanova from all the women sighing when he went to prison. I think. We took a boat around at night too and saw the city light up. The streets make no sense there but somehow we never got lost...even though we barely looked at a map. Randomly when we were trying to find our bus boat I ran into Nick Lepard, a friend from highschool. Next on to Roma!