Florence Day 1: Back to Work

I meet my boss over breakfast, and luckily the breakfast is pretty good. He's not looking in a much better state than my ragged bones. He was meant to arrive late last night, but his plane had engine trouble and he had to land in Bologna. His bus pulled into Florence after 2am.

Imagine that... You are on an Italian plane, and you understand Italian pretty well. You're sure they just announced that they were taking the plane down due to engine trouble, but you have to wait for the English to be sure...

How Ironic - It's Saint Andrews day, and it's the first day in about 5 days that I'm not wearing a kilt:



"desidera la Scozia in tensione"

We make our way slowly to the conference venue on foot. This is pretty much my first conscious look at Florence. Even though it's a cold breazy morning. The views of the buildings on the other side of the Arno are pretty amazing:



The conference venue is about a 15 minute walk away, so I recall all my stories of Leipzig and Prague(well mostly Prague), and my boss tells me about Florence(He used to live in Italy)

The first day of the conference in uneventful, we say hello to various project partners, and generally try to make it through the day on less sleep than we would have liked. I've travelling, so haven't had time to prepare my presentations yet, so I find a quiet corner and knock out a few of Keynote's finest. The wifi isn't working which makes things worse. What did we do before, wireless internet came as standard during conferences. Did we actually listen during presentations when they got boring.

Eventually day one is over and we head for the centre. I get to see various sites, :



The Duomo:



Michaelangelo's David:



And all the little streets:



We head for dinner at a small Restaurant. It;s a nice local place that tourists probably couldn't find. We start with a prawn salad, then I have a wild boar pasta which is wonderful. This is followed by a fillet steak which is rounded off by espresso and a limoncello. It is all wonderful and makes up for last night's crap food. The Italians know how to do things in style.

Normally, we would head for a few beers, but the food's heavy and we're tired, so I'm glad of another early night.

I fall asleep as soon as my head hits the pillow. I don't think I've recovered from Prague yet, and I suspect I have a cold....