May 10 and 11-A Garden of Eden

10 Maggio 2007

We arrived. And I have now been fundamentally awake for 33 hours straight. The drooling I may have done on the train from Milano hardly counts as sleep. And the proof is in this “typing.” It has taken me three hours to type the previous two sentences without error.


11 Maggio 2007

I always make up for lost sleep. It is simply impossible for me to go without my sleep – so whatever I miss I make up the next night. I proclaim this to be true but rarely have such impressive proof; last night, Thursday – our first night in Florence, Holly and I went to bed at 9:00 p.m. and woke up at noon on Friday. That is a stunning 15 hours of sleep. We rushed to get our clothes on – anything – because we realized we had missed the “cappuccino” hour. You simply cannot have a cappuccino in the afternoon without looking like a ridiculous tourist! So, we ran to Mercato Centrale and ordered one anyway at 12:40. They kindly did not roll their eyes at us.

I took Holly on a tour of Mercato Centrale. The smell of the raw meat at this early hour of the day (well, early only for us!) made her a little sick. So, we went to the second floor with the psychedelic display of vegetables, fruits, herbs and nuts. She was so moved; she was ready to start her own organic vegetable farm in Wisconsin and single-handedly promote a farmer’s market there. We picked up a little pack of fresh strawberries for .80 euro. They were brilliant red, looked like real strawberries, not the fake kind I realize I have gotten used to. I recall real ones from my grandmother’s garden when I see these.

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