Sorry we’ve got no new photos to share, but we’re still settling into our apartment in Firenze.  It was recently renovated and this is the first time it’s ever been rented, so we get to be the guinea pigs, and we’ve made some interesting discoveries.  The first was that you have to choose between the following appliances: heat, stove, washer, dryer.  You can’t run more than one at the same time without blowing all the circuits, which we found out on our first night when we ran the washer and dryer at the same time.  We spent the rest of the night and next morning with no heat, no hot water, and no refrigeration for our brand-new groceries.  This situation of course makes for interesting planning: wake up, turn off the heat, make breakfast, turn off the stove, turn on the washing machine…you get the idea.  We still haven’t figured out how to use the microwave. Today the rental agent brought over double-size sheets which she assures us will be sufficient to bind the twin beds together, and yesterday the owner got DSL hooked up for us, which was very nice of him but now we’re charged $2 an hour for internet.  (Can you believe they keep track of the time you spend on the internet once you have DSL?!)  We both overdid the hiking a little in the Cinque Terre so we’re nursing our muscles until we’re ready to go exploring in Florence – we’re about a 20 minute walk from the Duomo.  Our neighborhood is very upscale, but most of the restaurants nearby are foreign -- Chinese, Japanese, Mexican, Greek – so we haven’t yet tried Florentine cuisine, which was our favorite on our last trip to Italy.  Since our TV doesn’t get any English channels, not even CNN or BBC, we are pretty desperate to get some DVDs, but the neighborhood rental places are entirely automated.  We couldn’t for the life of us figure out how to do it, so we tried watching other people without looking like we were about to steal their credit cards or mug them, which is hard.  I saw one woman who didn’t look particularly Italian (she had dreadlocks) and yet obviously knew what she was doing, and when I asked her if she spoke English it turned out she was from NY, studying here.  She explained that you have to get a membership card, and the attendant is there on Wednesdays from 5:30-7.  Which seems about par for the course in terms of when things are actually open in Italy.  So that is our big task for today!