What we did in Vienna

So, we cancelled our tickets from Innsbruck and re booked ourselves on a train that left for Florence from Vienna itself.

The whole exercise left us almost 60 Euros poorer.

Madan was with us, and helped us board the train to Florence on time. The compartments are cramped but comfortable, much like the third ac compartments of Indian trains, only instead of curtains, the six beds are in small, fairly cramped coupes. Somehow we managed to squeeze our luggage into the tiny places provided for stashing it.

Very cool to look at from outside - Don't do overnight journeys in these!

We are sharing the same coupe with an Italian couple who don’t speak any of the languages we do. Dinesh is already asleep while I am typing this, the sun has set, so not much to see outside the window either…

Soon the Italian lady decided she wanted to sleep, and once she went to bed, I did too and it was only 9:30 in the evening.

I had written the above paragraphs before actually trying to sleep on my couchette. I felt completely boxed in, and had a faint feeling of claustrophobia because the ceiling of the train was so close. Somehow I slept.

I enjoy sleeping in trains, the shake and surge of the train coupled with the rhythmic sounds of the wheels on the tracks usually lulls and rocks me into deep slumber. On this train it was too cramped, made even worse, when in the middle of the night two more ladies entered the coupe with their luggage and found no place at all to keep it. They just bunged it in and went to sleep, and started to snore in a few minutes. It’s quite amazing how people who snore always fall fast asleep before people who don’t… Those ladies were also using up air in the coupe and I started to feel faintly suffocated too… to complete my woes, one person had put some horrible strong perfume.

Accept stuff  as it is, and many Om Namah Shivayas later we arrived in Florence, or as the Italians call it Firenze. Dario one of our teachers picked us up at the station and took us to his beautiful little home. We got the room in the cozy attic. It was raining a bit and nice and cold. Our beds were made. I snuggled in and woke up at 11:00 am. We had only a day to go around Firenze.

View from Dario's home

One of the first things you should know about Italy is that C on a tap in the bathroom means Hot water, the F on the tap stands for cold… otherwise you could get nastily burned or horribly shocked first thing in the morning.

We gobbled some breakfast and drove through some of the most charming roads I have been on. Narrow, with greenery spilling onto the roads over walls of beautiful villas and offering tantalizing views of the city through sudden gaps, these roads wound their ways to the Piazza de Michelangelo and lovely big square with superb panoramic views of the city.

Florence from Michelangelo Plaza

Here the great dome of the church of Florence, there the Ponte Vecchio, down below the river Arno, more bridges across the river, the tower of the palace de Medicci rising grandly into the sky, the green dome of the synagogue shy, but holding its own, and the many, many other buildings all framed by mountains with mist rising through them made an entrancing picture. A bronze replica of the very famous statue of David dominates the piazza, and an ancient graceful church rises above it at the back.

We went to the church and meditated there for a few minutes, enjoying the silence and the darkness. As we walked down a lovely gravel path to the piazza, Rosalinda, another of our teachers in Firenze, joined us and we made our way from there to the city proper.

Me and Dinesh in Florence

Then we walked. We walked everywhere. To the great church, but we didn’t go in, too long a line to get inside, then to various other smaller churches, a big square, and many other lovely spots. Some ostentatious, others unassuming and elegant.

Across the river there are many bridges, the most memorable of them is the Pont Vecchio, meaning the Old Bridge. It has shops that sell gold and jewelry literally growing out of it and has an old world italian charm to it quite unlike anywhere else. For the record, the stuff sold in those shops, no Indian would touch with a barge pole.

Me n Dinesh with the Pont Vecchio in the background

The ice cream place of Firenze is Grom’s. Dario and Rosalinda swore by it. This was not gelato that’s all the craze everywhere now, this was proper full cream eiscream! Unlike Tichy’s in Vienna this was not crowded, and we could get a taste of many flavours of their delicious ice cream before we ordered our ices. They were really, really nice. They give you a choice of 2 flavours together in one cup and I had a Sicilian cassata coupled with some biscuit and praline type thingie. It was brilliant. But I will have to admit that Tichy’s was just a shade better.

Grom - The Ice Cream place of Florence

I insisted that we wanted to see David, the icon of Firenze. He is kept in the Museum de l’aacademie. We stood in a pretty long line to get in, but it was worth it. The museum has a room full of beautiful old musical instruments. Lovely old Stradivarius violins, old old horns, bugles, trumpets and flutes. There was even a dulcimer dating back to the 1300s. And the oldest surviving upright piano in the world. A nice little exhibit that showed the difference between the mechanisms of a harpsichord and a piano. When you strike a key on the harpsichord, it doesn’t matter how hard or how lightly you strike it, you will always get only one sound, no variation in tone or volume. On a piano, the mechanism is such that depending on how you strike a key, there will be a huge difference in the quality and volume of the sound produced. It was nice to see in that room how the piano of today evolved from the dulcimer. Unfortunately, we couldn’t play any of the instruments, but you could see and hear a video of them being played.

We wandered into a few more rooms that had plaster works of the masterpieces which dot Firenze itself as well as many other cities in Europe. This particular museum seemed to be obsessed with the passion of Christ in its frescoes and had many, many paintings about His crucifixion and the miracles immediately after. Some were truly beautiful, others I couldn’t appreciate, and could only categorize under old.

Then at last we entered the grand hall, which houses amongst its many treasures David. He is an awe inspiring sight. He takes your breath away. He is beautiful, graceful… His eyes have a far away look to them, making me wonder what he was looking at, what he was thinking… Every aspect of his body is lovingly, painstakingly sculpted. It is incredible how cold hard marble can be made to look so fresh and alive. All he needs is some God to breathe life into him…

David

We gazed and gazed at him from many directions, until finally it was time to leave. I was quite hungry too and Dario had to leave for some yoga class he was teaching and Rosalinda who had left earlier came over to babysit us. She took us to Leo Gusto a trattoria which served among other things, pizza of course.

I had my first taste of real Italian Pizza and it was good, as good as the pizza we get back at home in India, say in Flaours in Delhi. I had not missed much. The grilled vegetable salad was strictly so-so.

We walked back to Rosalinda’s car, where we were joined by Julia, a bright, vivacious young girl and then went to her house. A pretty little place surrounded by trees and parkland begging to be explored (no time to do that), to check some details of tickets for our onward journey from Florence.

After a hot cup of very nice herbal tea and interminable surfing on the net, and no real decision about what we were going to do next, we drove to the brand new Art of Living Center in Florence. Vishwas and Nikhil who had arrived the day before to Rome, trained up to Florence and we picked them up on the way to the center.

Our Center in Firenze is a beautiful place. The space is divided into a nice big hall for Kriya, a spacious office and few smaller rooms for ayurveda treatment and consulting. Sparkling clean, white wooden floors, laid by Dario himself and cool green doors and paneling give it a feel of quiet calm which seems to be hiding a bit of whacky impishness. We recorded a Knowledge Sheet here, eventually it will be put up on the blog.

Pizza!!

We had another round of pizza at a place called Pizzaman. This stuff was a completely different quality. It was melt in your mouth goodness. Only a few places in the world could compete with this gastronomical delight. Throughly enjoyed our meal and then went home to dario’s to sleep.

We had planned to go to Pisa the next day, but instead dinesh took all our dirty clothes to the Laundromat while I preferred to do a nice long round of Sadhana.

It cost 11 Euros to wash our clothes!!

I absolutely adored Florence and would have loved to stay longer in this entrancing little city… maybe some other time…

Soon we piled up in Dario’s car. It’s a nice car, tall enough inside that you can comfortably do bhastrika. Next stop was Venice…

Jai Gurudeva!

love

bawa

(11 votes, average: 4.45 out of 5)

 Loading ...

• StumbleUpon
• BlinkList
• Yahoo
• Google
• del.icio.us
• Digg it
• Facebook
• Furl
• Sphinn
• Reddit
• ma.gnolia
• igooi

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 10th, 2010 at 10:30 am and is filed under Travel. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.