Picnic!

For lunch on our 2nd afternoon in Florence, (and right before we left town for our next stop,) we decided to stop by a local market to get some food. We went to the Market Centrale, which is a 2-story market, and we saw lots of cool stuff inside!

Laura with some raw meat!

Here's a cheese counter with a local customer. One of my favorite encounters on this day was asking a man at a cheese counter, (not the man - or cheese counter - pictured here), if he had any mozzarella cheese. He said, "Mozzarella" and emphasized the double zz sound, "or molta-" something. (I don't know what he said, but it didn't have the double zz sound). We clarified what we wanted, and he smiled and showed us where it was. He helped us with counting and numbers in Italian. And I had a sample of some kind of meat (similar to salami, kind of) from him, too. He was great!

Look at the three little pigs!

Here is some produce that is upstairs.

And then we had our picnic! We walked around for a little while looking for a nice place to have our picnic, but the square nearby was under construction, so we just went back to the market and sat on the stairs that led up to it. We had cherry tomatoes, fresh bread, fresh mozzarella balls, and watermelon!!!


It was a delicious picnic!!! Everything was so fresh and sooooo good!! While we sat on those steps and ate, we saw many people walk by, but I do not think we saw one other tourist. Everyone we saw looked like a local. That was cool! A few people chuckled at us sitting there on the steps, and a couple of people said something to us and smiled, and we just smiled back and kept on eating. It was fun!!