Florence thoughts.

: I reflected last night about the great feeling of happiness I felt at returning to Florence. Yes, I was certainly glad to escape from the insanity of traveling, but I really felt like Florence was a familiar and welcome spot…allllmost like home. I was excited to go to the pasticeria where I usually go (with the man who I KNOW recognizes me because I go almost every day, but will not smile at me, no matter how much I smile at hime), to go to the café where I usually get coffee (where the barista always smiles at me and I actually saw on my bus today, that was fun). It was fun to walk to school and greet the duomo again. At the same time, it’s fun to try new things and discover new parts of the city. I’d been to the Piazza Michaelangelo before (overlooks Florence) but today a friend and I went up to study and hung out through the beginning of sunset. It was fun to linger there and feel like natives and feel like we belong. Then I had a lovely walk by the Arno and observed some of the things that have become habitual to me, like seeing people rowing on the Arno in the evening or the open air market on the city side of the Ponte Niccolò. A man expressed his anger to me that it was “sempre quattordici!”, always bus number 14 (there had been 4 that passed us) and not the 32 we were waiting for. I loved my return to Florence…sinking back into the city life, the recognizable and the new, seeing Marcello’s smiling face at the bus stop and eating Giuliana’s wonderful food, and of course, the unbeatable feeling of sleeping in your “own” bed.

As a friend noted in an email, "Kind of cool that it took you going over to London (and your native tongue) and seeing some familiar faces to make Florence feel like home...no?"