Week 1!

I’ve made it through my first week of classes! All of my classes are great. My two art history classes seem interesting and they’re set up so half the classes are lectures and half are onsite visits, which is exactly what I was hoping for. Photography is cool as well. My professor is a hipster man from Brooklyn, and he’s young and awkward and hilarious. Italian is also great, it’s more focused on conversational Italian and the goal of the class is to make us comfortable with talking to Italians while we’re here. We’re also going to have Italian language partners from the state university in Florence to help us with Italian and to help them with English. We also learn about Italian culture in that class and we’re going to have a cooking class, a trip to an antique dealer, and a shopping trip. So no complaints about any of that!

I also applied to do some community service. I figured I should try to give back since I’m running amok throughout the city most of the time.. I applied to one organization that focuses on integrating American and Italians and then doing various service projects. I also applied to do some volunteer graphic design work at another organization so I’ll get to learn more about graphic design and apply my skillz and give back to Firenze. Bueno.

Other than all the school stuff we’ve been exploring the city day and night. I found two cafes right by my apartment where I can get espresso for one euro, a wine store where I can buy four bottles of wine for ten euro, WINE JUICE BOXES FOR 1 EURO, and a really great Panini shop called Pino’s Panini’s. Pino runs/owns the shop and he’s a very friendly, very funny man. He speaks pretty good English and claims that his Panini’s “are the best in all of Florence”. So Far I can’t argue. I got a turkey Panini with roasted peppers, eggplant, cheese, pesto and “spicy sauce”. It was heaven.

Perfection! They have red and white =]

Pino's Panini!

Michelle's Pino's Panini

And nowww nightlife.. I’ve found that just about all of the cafes that sell café & food during the day turn into a bar at night. This is both a curse and a blessing. It’s great because that means there’s probably over ten bars within two minutes of my apartment, but not so great when you go to get food or coffee hung over the next morning and you’re starting at a fully stocked bar. Ugh. The bars we’ve gone to were filled mostly with Italians, which is awesome but very weird. We’ve met some interesting people to say the least. For the most part everyone speaks “a little” English, and a little means they’re almost fluent. They all ask the same questions, “do you study,” “what you study,” “how old are you,” “where you from,” The guys are generally more friendly for one reason or another, but I’ve talked to some pretty cool girls too. There’s also a lot of clubs here, two right down the street from my apartment. The clubs are very American, but very expensive. At this one club called Twice, beers were 6 euro, mixed drinks were 8 euro and shots were 4 euro… We asked the bartender if they had any specials and he laughed and told us that everything was special. I’ve decided just to stock up on wine juice boxes and save my money…

So that’s all! One week down successfully and a bunch more to go. I slacked on pictures this week but there will be plenty more coming