Chocolate Tasting, Volunteer Training and Globe Trotting

…that’s more or less what my week has consisted of, and it’s been pretty perfect.

This week is the annual Chocolate Festival in Florence. It is becoming increasingly hard for me to understand how these people stay so thin. I mean the food they eat on a daily basis is unbelievably delicious, but a week long festival completely dedicated to the best chocolate around? Come on. So despite the bitter cold, we went to check it out today and we were not disappointed. There had to have been 15-20 tents set up in the Piazza Republica all dedicated to chocolate. Fruit dipped in chocolate, chocolate cakes, truffles, fudge, hot chocolate, hot chocolate with coffee, shoes shaped like chocolate… they have everything you could imagine and its all presented by the best chocolatiers. I had a piece of ridiculously decadent chocolate cake and strawberries covered in chocolate and it was absolutely the best I’ve had. We decided to stop there even though we probably could have cleaned out all of the tents (and our wallets). Better to sample all week than to eat it all in one day, right?

So moving on from the chocolate that I’m sure to dream about all week… as some of you may have read earlier, I’ve decided to do some community service while I’m here in Florence. I applied and was placed with the European branch of the Robert F Kennedy Center, which some of you may be familiar with. They have branches in DC and New York and just opened a branch in Florence. The foundation is dedicated to promoting and protecting human rights, and the European branch is especially dedicated educating and advocating those rights in European schools. The Florence branch is very new and is just getting on their feet so they’re asking for help from both American and Italian students. The main thing that we’re going to be doing for them is helping to organize their monthly advocacy events. Once a month they hold an event at a local café that features distinguished speakers that talk on behalf of a specific issue that changes monthly (February is environmental issues). We are asked to make & post flyers and handouts as well as spread the word and bring in an audience. It feels really good to be a part of something important, new and somewhat ground breaking while I’m here in Florence, and it’s adding a whole new aspect to my trip that I wasn’t expecting.

So off of the (somewhat) heavier stuff and onto a more typical part of a travel abroad students experience… travel!!! I’ve more or less finalized my travel schedule, and I could not be more excited. I haven’t even gotten to any of these places yet, and my mind is already blown. I really can’t believe the life that I’m living. If you had told me a year or two ago that I would be traveling the world and living in Europe, I probably would have laughed in your face. I mean, studying abroad has been a dream of mine since high school, but there was always a part of me that doubted that it would happened. I’ve never traveled or done anything remotely like this before, so wrapping my head around it was just about impossible. It still is hard to believe, but here I am, and here I go. These next three months are going to be the best I’ve ever had, and I’ve never felt so lucky.  Venice, Switzerland, Rome, Amalfi Coast, Pisa, Amsterdam, Barcelona and Croata, here I come!

Ciao everyone!