Tourists and gold
Trip Start
Sep 05, 2007
1
20
21
Trip End
Dec 24, 2007
Florence, Italy
Tuesday, December 11, 2007
while waiting for the key mistress to arrive at my place of residence and open the damned door for me i found some Canadian scallywags I had commandeered for part of my crew back in Nice. My fierce pirating abilities were too much for them, and they had to abandon ship before the mission was complete. so needless to say they were only slightly worried when they found me in their new hide out. They knew that with me around the heat would be on, and fast. so they started singing me some story about how they have to run north to the snow. crazy bastards getting themselves all land locked like that. but they agreed to hang out with me later that night for a bit.
before long the wench arrived with they keys and briefly outlined the terms and conditions of my stay in this roach motel. Silence seemed to be at the top of the list. in hindsight I think this has something to do with a scientific experiment to understand the communications of roaches. But i got settled in, and set out the explore the town and obtain some food before nightfall.
the town was much smaller then i thought it would be, but i quickly staked out all the major points of interest... Museums, the bridge of gold, David, etc etc. and returned home with a bounty of food and drink for the next few days. enough rations to tie me over for anything that could happen.
now this bridge of gold that I keep talking about. I forget the name in Italian, but that is insignificant because, well because gold is all you need to know about it. originally, some several hundred years ago it had been a bridge of butchers. but its amazing what the resolve of the wealthy can do for something like this. someone from the Medici family decided that the bridge stank and and looked like ass with all these butchers on it. and they proclaimed that instead all the shops would sell gold. the modern day interpretation of this proclamation is a whole lot of DIAMONDS, as well as some other funky looking precious stones and Coral. but the important part is DIAMONDS!!! now, I don't like to consider myself a fool, but I think that if this bridge were to fall into the water, it would turn into the biggest cluster-fuck of a salvage operation in the history of time. ill bet close to a billion dollars worth of goods would plunge to the depths of the river. and I also know that the security of the place rendered it a place uninhabitable for pirates, no matter how good they think they may be. so I abandoned any aspirations I had for the place. other then to look at it and drool a little bit as I walked by.
later, I met up with my Canadian counterparts, as was previously arranged, and we set out for a place to consume vast quantities of cheep Italian wine. now, the nice thing about a town situated in the bend of a river is there is no shortage of bridges, and in a short time we found one with a perfect outcrop below the rail for sitting, and contemplating the cold, and the richness of the gold.
an interesting side note about this town is the abundance of the English language it is nearly impossible to go more then five steps without hearing someone speaking it. so the rain of the next day, and the abundance of Americans in the beautifully town made me more then happy to set out for the Tourist and Religious capital of Italy.... Rome. where I would work at an inn in the country side for ten days. while making brief forays into the craziness of the city.
