Scammed in Florence

Florence is not much different than Rome, except that there are a lot more shops and a lot more Piazza’s to visit. Our favorite spot in Florence was definitely the statue of David. It was a truly magnificent sight. If anyone plans on going to Florence, don’t be fooled into only seeing the copy version of it. Go see the real thing in the museum. It is definitely worth the 6 Euros admission fee. The statue was so detailed you would think that David was going to walk off the podium. Too bad we weren’t allowed to take pictures of it.

For Kenny, the best part about Florence was that it had Hawaiian Pizza for him. It wasn’t anything compared to the ones at Pizza Hut, but it was sure better than eating cold sandwiches again…=)





The only difference between Rome and Florence is that it is much smaller in size. It seemed like we were able to walk through the whole city within a day. There are a lot more shops here and a lot of yummy desserts to try. We tried their 3 scoops gelato (flavors were coffee, tiramisu, and mango), it was delicious!!! I really liked the Tiramisu flavor. Kenny’s favorite was of course the Mango!! I would have loved to shop here in Florence if we weren’t traveling anymore afterwards. But I don’t think I would be allowed into the gates with a luggage full of new shoes. I loved their shoes in Italy. They have great styles here. Joannie, you would have gone nuts here.

Ok in terms of being scammed, it wasn’t as bad as the stolen incident in Barcelona. But I definitely think we were fooled. We were exploring the streets of Florence one night and, of course, they always have the street people selling purses, sunglasses, all targeted at the tourists. Well, there was one vendor that sold these dancing cartoons of Bart Simpson, Mickey Mouse, and Donald Duck. How it worked was the cartoon would dance on its own when music is being played. I asked the vendor how it worked, and he told me through the vibrations of the music, the cartoon would dance on its own. We thought that this was different and decided to buy it to bring it back home. Ok, so we got back to our hotel room and decided to test it out. As I opened the package, there were instructions on how to do it. The first line of the instructions was “tie a string through the tongue on the back of the cartoon and move the string forward to see the cartoon dance”. I was like “tie a string??”, why would I need to tie a string if it was supposed to move on its own. In any case, we turned on our laptop, blasted the music and hoped for the cartoon to dance on its own. Nope, it didn’t move. So we tried a different song, and again it didn’t dance. So at this point, we realized we got scammed. We looked over the cartoon closely again and realized that the whole thing was just a paper cut out. There were no magnets or any chip to read the vibrations of the music. When we first saw it at the vendor, we thought that the foot of the cartoon were magnets, but they are only square paper cut outs stapled onto the string of the cartoon. Haa haa, the joke is on us now…..