Soccer

There is just not that much to report from Firenze. We walk around the town trying not to step on the other tourists toes, stand in line with hundreds of other people for the privilege of climbing stairs or looking at churches, go to the bathroom, or have ice-cream, and pay extraordinarily high entrance fees for pretty much everything. So what is there to report from the city many people dream of seeing and visiting? A few mundane odds and ends. Today was another soccer game at Campo di Marte, the ball park close by. Don't ask me whom Fiorentina played, it doesn't interest me in the slightest but it was pretty obvious they played and they didn't win (okay, it was tied, I looked it up).
I reckon some readers might be upset about this but I have to admit I have never understood all that frenzy about watching sports. In the US, with that whole football, baseball, basketball craziness going on all the time I tend to forget how obsessed Europeans become when it comes to their beloved soccer. Here in Florence we saw crowds of grown men wearing purple (or rather a darkish shade of lavender), normally not a color associated with the typical Italian macho-male, wave flags, get drunk and scream like Max when he pretends to be a baby-dinosaur all in the name of Fiorentina, the cherished home team. There was a constant stream of traffic, police helicopers and in general police presence around Campo di Marte,which means around our house and we could pretty much follow the game by just listening to the collective screams and sighs of the crowd. The mood afterwards was pretty subdued, which I think is far to be preferred to the drunken, horn-kunking, screaming-slogans type of craziness we saw when the beat Palermo last week. I just still marvel at how hords of grown men who seem otherwise pretty reasonable (most, not all) seem to derive a lot of their emotional and maybe even physical wellbeing from the fact that 11 guys - most of which probably weren't born in Florence or even Italy - score one more goal that the 11 guys from Milano (or wherever) - most of which weren't born in Milano (or wherever).
Max and I were on our way to piazza Savanarola to chase pigeons when the game was over and could hardly cross the street for the motorcycles and cars. The fact that they weren't honking like Indian rickshaw drivers hinted that the game didn't end as hoped. The solemn figures slowing walking through the park, their heads bowed did the rest to convince me that, no, "we" did not win this one. Some day somebody please explain to me why this might be important and a reason to feel sad and while he (as presumably the person trying to undertake such a hopeless task will be male) is at it maybe he could broaden the scope of the discussion somewhat and include why and how it makes sense to care one way or the other about some ..... (fill in word that comes to mind) ... game.
Okay, what else? The weather has been nice. Warm and sunny and word must have gotten all the way to Finland and outer Mongolia as the tourists, plentiful to begin with must have doubled or tripled within the last few days. There is basically no getting throught he city anymore. Today we attempted to visit the Boboli gardens behind the Palazzo Pitti. For reasons that have more to do with Max's latest temper-tantrum - which almost resulted in the police being called - than anything else we actually didn't see the gardens. But in addition to a screaming toddler the deterents were: about a mile long line to buy tickets and another mile long line to have them ripped apart again to gain access as well as a steep 9 Euro entrance fee just for the gardens plus the lesser exhibits like the porcelain museum (who would ever claim it to be a good idea to visit a porcelain museum with a child) and the prospect of hearing only Finish, Mongolian, English and German. So we walked back home, across the Ponte Vecchio which was so full of people that we couldn't do "Engele Flieg" ("Fly little Angel" - a very popular thing with tired toddlers where Mom and Dad hold on to a hand each, lift the tired toddler up and swing him forward while saying "Engele flieg!"), towards the Duomo where one could barely think about Engele flieg and up Via Cavour for a bit where we finally were able to sqeeze one "Engele" in.
That's all I have to report, other than that I fianlly actually know my tenses in English as I made a cheat sheet for Jutta and have asked her questions today to practice for her exam coming up tomorrow. It's time to get out of the city and we are planning a trip which probably take us to Ancona and the rest of the "Marken" another province of Italy, surely touristy as well but hopefully much less so than the epicenter of Tuscan tourism that we currently live in.