Birthday Day

I started out my 21st birthday with a motorcycle ride into town from Pietro, which rocked! As my dad said, it's one of those really authentic Italian moments that you just can't buy! He dropped me off at the Porta Romana, so that I could walk into town to go to the Uffizi.

The Uffizi is a pretty cool museum/art gallery. I don't think any of their art is modern, most of it is at least 300 years old, and a lot of it is even older. Some came from the private collections of the Medici family, who ruled Florence until the 17th century. They were great patrons of art during the Renaissance, encouraging and paying for many famous works of art to be created. This includes Botticelli's Birth of Venus.

After the Uffizi I treated myself to a fancy lunch at a restaurant with this view. It was rather delicious(both the view and the lunch)!


My other birthday treat to myself was this, which is also the big surprise I mentioned in the last post. I got my hair cut short! I went to a place near Santa Maria Novella Church, which I had passed the day before. The guy who cut it was named Leroy, which is possibly the most un-Italian first name I have ever hear, however, he spoke no English at all. It took three tries and me pointing at a picture before he finally got just how short I wanted it. When he got there he exclaimed 'Basta!' which means 'Enough!'


When I got back to the house Oretta told me that they would take me out for pizza. We were going to go to a restaurant, but her brother had been to a festival in town that had some very good mushrooms. There has been so much rain that the mushrooms are particularly excellent right now. We decided that that would be even better than a restaurant. When we got there it turned out that the festival was a fundraiser for the local chapter of the Italian left-wing democratic party, which is really just a fancy way of saying communist. The whole thing was family run, with the parents doing all the cooking, and the kids serving. This of course led to some very confused (and tired) kids running around with dishes, trying to serve them to all the wrong people. I had the mushroom pizza, and it was very tasty.

When we got back to the house Oretta lit some candles stuck in the rind of a watermelon cut in half. It was the perfect addition to having already eaten so much food. All round an excellent day!