First day in Florence

Trip Start Aug 28, 2007

Trip End Dec 16, 2007

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Flag of Italy Florence, Italy
Wednesday, August 29, 2007

Oh well hellooooo! I'm spending my first night in Firenze! How exciting! But it was suuucchhh a long day. Attempts to sleep on the first flight didn't go well. The seats were not kind to my back and butt and my legs cramped up and fell asleep a lot. We landed for an hour layover in Munich, Germany. It's was rainy and depressing when we landed (shocker). There were too many clouds to even see the Alps :( I know...sucks. But when we landed in Florence it was like 95 and sunny as all get out. Luckily, unlike in PVD, I managed to get all of my luggage! Yesss! Thank God. All of the girls did actually. A few of the guys are missing a bag.

And holy shit! We took taxis from the airport to our apartments (which were paid for by the school). So Ash and I went in a car together. These drivers are CRAZY! There were people in the street EVERY where once we got into the city! And these taxi drivers show no patients and LITERALLY bump them with their bumper! And the people just think nothing of it and move! It's insane! So then he got frustrated because he got lost twice on the way to our apartment, and then proceeded to give up on navigating and dropped us off and all we could make out was "20m on left or right" as he pointed down a street as he unloaded our luggage into a small square. Luckily, Kara was looking out the window and saw us and yelled for us, or we would have walked right past it!

We're not in the apartments across the Ponte Vecchio, but the boys are. So we'll be walking it a lot! We did walk over it and we all managed to get a ridiculous amount of pictures.

Cheese, in the windo!

But, regardless whether we're on the other side of the Ponte Vecchio or not, we do have to walk over it every day in order to get to studio. Apparently it is located on that side of the Arno. Our apartment is great! Six girls (3 bedrooms), two bathrooms, one shower, a kitchen and living/dining room. However, after drawing who got what room, Kelly and I managed to get the room with the least storage space. For clothes we have our desk drawers and one armoire half of which is for hanging clothes, the other half has 3 shelves to store our clothes in. Quite interesting. I put my PJs and running clothes out in one of the closets in the hall since the other girls said it was okay. Which worked out fine. It's quaint and doable. It may get old after a while, but hey...it's a small price to pay for living in Italy for 3.5 months! We have so many windows with a wide sill so we can sit in them and look down into the Piazza de San Martino. We are actually across the street from Dante's Inferno's house!

We have a great location for our apartment, we're in the center of the shopping and Piazza Della Signoria is literally one street away! It's so great with the clock tower and all of the statues! There are shops EVERY where and we sat at an Irish Pub...ha in Italy, I know. But. We did manage to eat dinner at a ristorante called Birreria Centrale, located around the corner from our apartment which was quiet and relatively reasonable in price. It was soooo good. Each of us got a different meal and let everyone try it. It's so much easier to find out what you like! I got a Insalata Caprese (tomato & mozzarella salad)...of course. Kara had a Tuscan Risotto (rice) dish...SO good! And Dana had something that was really good as well! They even had music - trumpet, violin, and an accordion. So like I said, we met up with the boys later after we got Gelato...so good! Better than ice cream! Andddd it came in waffle cones dipped in chocolate and nuts! Haha, right up my alley.

Tomorrow we have to report to the school at 9:00am. It's a 10-15 minute walk if we walk quickly. I'm going to attempt to sleep with all of these hoodlums destructing things downstairs in the street and the piazza. So I should probably go to bed before they get too loud! I'll finally be able to check my e-mail t'mar and upload these entries! Ciao!