Bella Italia - Florence

We flew from LAX via Munich to Florence, the journey went very smooth and Florence airport is so small that is was no problem finding the driver from the hotel, who picked us up. We decided to pick up the rental car on the Monday instead of the Saturday when we landed since you don´t really need a car when staying in the city.

Florence is of course know for its cathedral and it such a nice contrast to where we currently are living. Buildings are old and carry so much history. This of course means streets are often narrow and small pavements.I didn´t quite expect so many tourists in mid September, but it was very very crowded - Swedes, Germans, Brits, Americans - all over the place. It was actually a little too touristy for us, and also it was difficult to move about with the pram with all the crowds around us, especially since Florence wasn´t child friendly whatsoever.

I was quite surprised to see all the jewlery stores lined up next to each other, just like a mini version of the gold souk in Dubai but with MUCH higher prices.

Luckily, I bought the dress for the wedding before leaving OC, because here I would not have found anything Not only mini sizes, but not so many shops (apart from Gucci, Louis Vitton..Zara and H&M) around as I had hoped for.

All in all we spent 2 nights in Florence before oicking the rental car up and driving south. Talking about rental cars..whatever you do, do not rent a car with Hertz in Florence or Italy. We had to queue for 2 hours before actually getting the key to the car and then having to fiddle around trying to fit the child seat in the car. 2 HOURS folks! Everything was manual in their system, the clerk had to go to the garage and check the car before giving it to us and so on. They even had one of these old machines for the credit card, you know, where they push this metal thing across the card and it copis the details on to the paper.