I think it involves a boat

This morning's sprint through Florence consisted mainly of haggling at the market for a leather jacket that I absolutely don't need (but it stopped me in my tracks and I love it and Mario swears it has a five-year warranty) and going inside the Duomo. Where it turned out that I did need the leather jacket, because I'm wearing a tank top and bare shoulders would apparently desecrate the church in a way that flash photography, baseball hats, and tour groups don't. I'm taking it as a sign that buying the jacket was the right thing to do. The Duomo is the fourth largest cathedral in the world; just across from it is the baptistery where Dante was baptised. Very cool: old, Roman architecture, nice art. I won't go on about it. And I think the coffee in Italy is a tiny bit better than the coffee in Spain. But don't tell Spain I said that.

We left Florence this afternoon to go to Ancona to catch the ferry to Croatia. The cops in the Florence train station were on Segways. I have a hard time being intimidated by people on Segways.

I'm not really a boat person. I tend to get seasick. But the big boat across the Adriatic from Ancona, Italy, to Split, Croatia, seemed like our best option so here we are. I am so glad we didn't rent a car. Getting the cars on the boat was somehow chaotic and slow at the same time and it definitely would have stressed me out. There was one guy who took the license plate off his car before he drove it onto the boat; not sure what kind of operation they're running here, exactly.

While we were waiting to board the boat we were cornered by this guy wearing shorts with a hole in the crotch who told us about how he used to live in Detroit but had to leave because there were too many black people there. What is it with the racists everywhere we go? He was saying that the 1950's were great, but then in the 60's Martin Luther King started the civil rights movement and brought black people to the north. Then he said he wasn't racist but that "black people are just hard on things, you know, they break things." I kind of wanted to break him. Thankfully the conversation ended when some other guy's car started rolling backwards and almost hit a bit truck that may or may not have contained explosives. Sprinting across the parking lot, the car owner was somehow able to stop the car just before it hit the truck, and in the excitement we were able to get the hell away from the racist.

Another unpleasant thing, there's guy on the boat laying on a couch in the bar area. He's got his shirt completely unbuttoned and half off, was kinda fondling his chest hair when we walked past, and had a large plate of cold cuts in front of him. Otherwise the boat is kind of okay, though. There are some people on the deck singing what sounds like a Croatian version of "If you're happy and you know it." They just formed a conga line. There's a guy in what looks like a monk's outfit wandering around. And we're drinking Zlatorog, crappy Slovenian beer with a picture of a gazelle on the can. So we may have learned the Slovenian word for Gazelle.