The Arrival

Finally we arrived in Florence on that afternoon of August 10th, 2012, after about 4 hours trip back from our awesome holiday in Switzerland. It was a safe and fast trip, even on the swift train that connected us from Milan to Florence. 

We were so amazed of how fast the train goes…the speed was 300km/hour. Fortunately the process of getting the house keys in a café at Porta Romana was also smooth. Plus a cup of espresso for refreshment after a long trip made the whole trip a perfecto. As we walked across the giardino pubblico next to the famous giardino di Boboli to get to our house, we felt the sunlight piercing our bare skins. It was nearly 40°C in Florence. As many have told us, August 2012 is the hottest month of the summer; and it turned out that this summer 2012 is the hottest summer in Florence. So welcome to Firenze! 

We dragged our luggage and entered the house we rent for coming 2 years. Relieved to see some of our stuffs we have dropped there last week were still stacked in front of our front door. Sweats run down our foreheads and wet our stinky shirts. For fresh air, we decided to open some windows, after a while, as we were busy with organizing our stuffs in the living room, we got bitten by mosquitoes, in the room! Then we realized we were having guests! Our flying guests, mosquitoes, were annoyingly disturbing, so we had to close all our windows and spent the rest of that day chasing them around. However, finally we got it settled. 

The house is on 1st floor (this would be counted as the 2nd floor, as well as the ground floor here would be called the 1st floor in Indonesia), the outer wall was painted in warm yellow, mounted with green old style windows, typical Italian country house. The inner wall was painted in white except for the kitchen. I found the kitchen very nice! And we both like it a lot. The kitchen is extended to our small balcony at the back with stairs down to our backyard on the ground floor and a little shed. It’s perfect. We like our new house and glad as we've found some similarities of it compared to our house in Westwood, Surabaya. Made us feel at home.

That evening, after we had espresso for two, we bought some food from a nearby supermarket and prepared our first dinner, in our house, in Florence. It was pane baguette with assorted ham, formaggio, oliva, fresco insalata and freddo birra bianco alla Germano. We set them on the small table on our small balcony and enjoyed them with grateful heart. God has been so very good to us!