Florence!

I had the incredible good fortune to be sent to Florence, Italy last week on work-related business. It also happened to coincide perfectly with my birthday. Naturally I took the trip as a welcomed break from life in Baku, and while the work was long and hard, I had two days at the end to simply enjoy the amazing food, beautiful people, sexy language, and mind blowing gelato. It was a perfect way to spend this birthday. Of course the experience wasn't entirely without incident. I did suffer an unfortunate cheese-related-injury (or CRI, as I am calling it). All due to my intense love and devotion to parmesan. My final night in Florence I found a shop and bought a big block of parmesan to take (smuggle) back to Azerbaijan with me. And in my excitement to taste it (it has been so long since I just ate a really good chunk of parmesan cheese!) I tried desperately to break off a piece...but it was too hard, and I was too impatient. I had no knife, so my next poorly judged moved was to use my fingernails. Well, let this serve as a warning to all those who follow after me - good hard parmesan cheese under the fingernails can CAUSE SERIOUS BODILY INJURY. At the moment it was happening I didn't realize it, perhaps because I was focused on the taste of the thing, but once my little feast was over the pain began to set it. I had cheese PACKED under the nails of my forefinger and thumb SO hard that I had actually separated skin from nail. Cringe. Days later and I am still feeling the effect of that CRI.

A better outcome was had when I made the somewhat impulsive decision to get my haircut in Florence. It had been almost a year, and I was getting tired of looking like a hippie...and, right or wrong, I assumed that even a bad haircut in fashionable Italy would be better than most haircuts I would get in Azerbaijan. So upon recommendation of a woman who lives in Florence, I fumbled through making an appointment (in very very poor Italian), and when the time came I went in armed with a photo and the spirit of pantomime. With no common language, I had a hilarious time communicating with all the staff, trying to show what I wanted, trying to compromise with the woman who was doing my cut (and insisting that she needed to take a LOT more off than I wanted) - and in the end I am pretty sure she just did what she wanted, with a team of cute Florentine shampoo girls and stylists all looking on and talking about the crazy foreigner with the ridiculously long hair. And although she took about 5 times more off the length than I wanted, she was right. Her sense of style is much better than mine, and in the end I love the cut. And she even did a quick eyebrow plucking before I left as well. Florence is dreamy.