Italy Day 6 or 7...I don't know

Friday, April 20:
Possibly the funniest day of the trip for me. We awoke at 6am to a cold rainy morning. We ate a good breakfast. And by word of mouth I found out that some people didn’t go to bed but decided to scale the balconies. This wouldn’t have been a big deal to me because it is pretty easy to move from balcony to balcony on the same floor. But, however, I found out the Thad and Corwin (the guys who partook in this activity) were moving up and down floors visiting people’s rooms. After hearing that I laughed. However, my respect for the two increased tremendously. They are now McT band legends., which isn’t hard to be at all. Eventually, the news of the actions spread to Mr. Hallman and the two ended up having to spend the day with Mr. Porter, I’m not sure but I think leases were involved. We left Montecatini for Florence at 8am. I slept the whole way. We all arrived in Florence and began to head to the museum that held Michelangelo’s David. The museum was very interesting and it held many well known sculptures and artifacts, many of which I recognized. Then I entered the large room where David was being held. The statue is huge! And very detailed and beautiful (I don’t mean that in gay way). Seeing that, is something I will tell my grandkids about. We all left the museum amazed and we split into group once more to explore Florence. This time instead of splitting off with Mr. Sims and the normal group. I decided to go with my friend Alex Forte and his group. His group was comprised of Jay Champagne, Matt Flanagan and their Moms. It was a lot of fun. And random. We saw the famous jewelry and leather shops of Florence, the bridge that holds some of those shops. Almost a week into being in Italy I finally had my first somewhat real sit-down Italian meal. We found a pizza café, and had some authentic Italian pizza. Which is very different from the American pizza…its better. Then the chaperones said we could split up go and do whatever we wanted without any sort of adults. So Alex and I both went off for some debauchery and pillaging. Actually, we just walked around. I looked at a book bag because my broke and that’s about it. Alex and I are two crazy guys. We are lucky we didn’t get arrested or deported. It was fun however, we went to the many shops and saw the famously cheap but high quality Florence leather shops. At one point it rained. Florence was filled with gypsies (real gypsies) and it was very active with wide streets. And I lot of walking room and not much traffic. It was a very unique place. After the rain, the sun came out and created a beautiful and windy late afternoon. Our third performance took place in Florence in the very historic and beautiful PalazzoVechio. We tried to play concert music but the wind blew all of our music sheets around so we ended playing our marching music that we could secure to our instruments and also it was mostly memorized. The crowd loved it. And once again, I got to play at a very historic and famous place. Palazzo Vechio, can be seen in the movie Hannibal and many other movies. In Hannibal, if you have seen it, there is part of the movie where Hannibal Lector throws a guy off a high tower. That tower is in the square we were at. The guy’s guts (he was slashed open by Hannibal) falls on the ground at the exact place where we played. Disgusting, huh? It’s a good movie though. Also, Palazzo Vecchio has several very big and beautiful fountains, along with many sculptures, and a life size replica of the statue of David. The real statue actually stayed in that square for a good amount of time before it was moved into the museum. It was a very cool experience. After the performance, we all walked to dinner and experienced a pretty awesome sunset. The sky was a brilliant blue and against the skyline of Florence made some wonderful Kodak moments. After a good walk we arrived at the restaurant. This restaurant was a pretty interesting compared to the others. It kind of resembled a Morrison’s, but without the buffet. We ate pretty much the same stuff, pork, potatoes, salad, bread and water. We had a really cool waiter who joked a lot and flirted with the girls, in the typical European fashion. It was fun. And another great day was behind me. We had a sleepy bus ride back to our hotel in Montecatini. We ALL went to bed early.