Otto picking out melons at the fruit stand
12 days in and only 2 more left in the magical city of Florence, Italy. We have fallen into a daily routine that is quite different than life on Mercer Island. Undoubtedly, each country will have its own vibe and rhythm so it is interesting to compare.
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We are trying to stick to a daily budget in Italy of $150 USD for the 7 of us. This is EVERYTHING including toothpaste, laundry soap, transportation, gelato, coffee, etc. So far, we have done a pretty good job sticking to it with the help of the kids. We eat one meal out, either dinner or lunch, and the other two at our apt. Breakfast consists of bread, butter, jam, salami, cheese, fresh melon, pears, yogurt and Italian coffee we make ourselves! 
When picking a restaurant, we gauge everything off the cost of a margherita pizza. 5 euro is a great place, 10 euro is out of our range 😉 We use Yelp to find good, inexpensive options and try to go somewhere new everyday. In addition to restaurants, we remain in search of the perfect gelato so we have walked all over the city trying the top rated places…(this is a great way to discover new neighborhoods too!)
When picking a restaurant, we gauge everything off the cost of a margherita pizza. 5 euro is a great place, 10 euro is out of our range 😉 We use Yelp to find good, inexpensive options and try to go somewhere new everyday. In addition to restaurants, we remain in search of the perfect gelato so we have walked all over the city trying the top rated places…(this is a great way to discover new neighborhoods too!)
Cappuccino!…we did NOT make this ourselves :)
After breakfast in the morning, we do our laundry which has to be washed by hand and hung on the clothes line off our balcony. We are grateful for our “no cotton clothes” rule because our clothes can dry in 2-3 hours. We also have to wash all our dishes by hand because there isn’t a dishwasher.
The view from our balcony that shows our clothes line :)
We do some reading and school work and end up leaving our apt around 1 pm. Our apt is about 1.5 miles from the Duomo so we can walk everywhere…It is awesome! We take bottles of water with us because we learned early on that we could waste a lot of euros on buying water otherwise.
everybody reading and taking turns using the computer in our apartment
We try to focus on seeking out at least one new thing a day whether it be a museum, a piazza or something else from Atlasobscura.com …thank you Karen B for the recommendation! With all the walking we are averaging around 10 miles a day which helps us burn off the gelato We have fallen into the Italian way of life so most nights we don’t eat dinner before 8:30-9!
We have fallen into the Italian way of life so most nights we don’t eat dinner before 8:30-9!
Otto pretending to touch Galileo’s Middle Finger…on display under safety glass at the Galileo Museum! A random thing we found in atlasobscura.com !
On our way home each day, we stop by the bakery, fruit stand and meat/cheese shop to get provisions for the next day. Why can’t we have bakeries and fruit stands on Mercer Island like the ones they have here? It is such a great way to shop!
Otto picking out melons at the fruit stand and sporting a contraband (cotton) t-shirt
Local bakery…so hard to decide!
Bedtime has slipped for all of us but it seems like nothing opens very early anyway. We are committed to trying to get up for at least 1 sunrise in each place so we will see if we can pull it off in Italy before we leave on Tuesday 😉
Ciao!
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