The Adventures of Kinky Reggae: A Vagabond for Beauty

I started the day with one of my favorite pastimes- snarking on Renaissance art at the Uffizi. So many ugly baby Jesuses!  (Why is the pope hanging out with baby Jesus??) (The angel Gabriel is doing the annunciation via telepathy) (Receding hairline!) (Jesus got into his mom’s eye makeup!) I loved seeing the Birth of Venus! And they had this cool old map that showed monsters in the ocean. And you have to always remember to look up because the ceilings are spectacular! It’s also just amazing to think about how old this place is. (Built in 1560!) But these statues made me laugh… they look like they’re doing disco moves. This was unexpected exciting. Wandering through a random room, and I stopped and almost said out loud, “I know that guy!” Growing up Lutheran, these pictures of Martin Luther were everywhere; it was awesome to stumble across the originals! Last thing I saw/loved- Medusa’s death. Next, I walked across the Ponte Vecchio and (very) briefly considered buying a piece of gold j

I’ve made it to Florence and I’m in a cute little apartment, but the heat is killing me. It’s making it hard to motivate myself to go out, and I have no appetite. But there are 1 million things to see here, and I am going to try to be diligent about blogging so I remember the names of what I’ve done. For better or worse, I’ll keep track of it all here.  I chose to walk from the train station to my apartment last night which was a good call; it was so cool to come around a corner and see this:  After a long day of travel yesterday, I got a late start today. I walked over to il Mercato Céntrale and had a slice of pizza. It reminded me of La Boqueria in Barcelona- too crowded, hot, and nothing I was really interested in. It’s just not fun to eat lunch when there’s sweat dripping down your legs, just like when I used to do bikram yoga.  I stopped at an English bookstore near the duomo that had a very disappointing selection. Then I stopped at the supermarket and was actually very impressed

I promised myself I would blog daily. Ha! To be fair, I did write some stuff down, just didn’t follow through. I’ll try to go back and fill it in. For now, I’ll just summarize Barcelona.  This experience has been both easy and difficult. We’ll start with the good stuff. Barcelona is easy to get around, and the city feels very comfortable. I love how historic it is, the windy narrow complicated roads, the buildings that look uninteresting until you step inside to a beautiful spacious restaurant, the balconies and modernista architecture… it’s such an interesting place. I love the fact that everything is in Catalan here, including public school instruction, because they understand that if the language dies, so does the culture. Sadly, I have not picked up much Catalan… sortida, espere, and si us plau is pretty much it.  I love that climate change doesn’t seem to be up for debate here. Cab drivers drive Priuses and Teslas. Public transportation is widely used. People walk everywhere (in m