made it to rome

i know i know, its been a few days since ive updated this thing. we've sorta been in internet limbo since dan's internet service wasnt working. first ill sum up the rest of our stay in florence. it was amazing. the end. we went to the academia museum and saw michelangelo's statue of david. it blew me away. everyone has seen a picture of it before, but no picture can possible convey how large this statue really is. it's at least 25ft high and carved out of one solid piece of marble. it was amazing. we spent a little while at the duomo basilica which seemed like the center piece of the town. yet again this church was absolutely amazing. even by todays standards it was an amazingly large and complex structure. i cant imagine what it would have taken to build this building hundreds of years ago. lastly we visited a palace that was on the other side of town. you guessed it...it was amazing. that seems to be a recurring theme to everything around here. if i was a responsible writer i would trying and find another word...meh o well. this palace had one neat exhibit that really stuck out to me. it housed a whole exhibit of art that had been stolen at some point and then recovered and brought back to italy. there were some neat stories of the modern history of each piece. so after we saw everything we wanted to in florence we packed up shop and made our way to rome. i think by the time this trip is over we should have the whole packing up, getting on the train, and going somewhere down pat. so now that we're in rome we've spent most of the weekend just sorta walking around, eating, and soaking everything in. its great to hang out with our ghetto tourguide/historian dan. he also knows where all the best places around to eat, which in my humble opinion is just as important as seeing all of the major sites. we're going to a football game on sunday afternoon. hopefully no european soccer riots will break out while we're there. ill just try and keep my chin down. anyways, thats been sorta the short version of whats been going on so far. now that dan has paid his internet bill hopefully ill be better about updating this thing while we're in rome.

p.s. that picture of ashley is taken from the palace we went to in the gardens overlooking the tuscan countryside :)