Firenze=Florence

We went on our first field trip with the school yesterday to beautiful Florence! We went in a big tour bus and it took us about 2.5 hours to get there! Once we arrived, we met up with this woman named Alessia who took us on a tour of the city. We went to the duomo there and saw a couple of buildings around it...we walked by their big market that has tons of vendors selling things like scarves, purses, etc. We walked on the Ponte Vecchio which is a bridge over the Arno River that goes through Florence. We took a lot of amazing pictures because the water and the other bridges are so fantastic. Next she took us by their shopping district and showed us where all of the big name stores were. Then we went to the town hall area and we got to see a replica of the David, which is where it originally was but they have since moved it. We didn't get to see the real one..for some reason they assume we will go on our own to see the popular stuff so they usually show us random things that are still cool and are probably still really famous but we just have no idea that they are. Then we had a break for lunch so we went to this pizza/calzone place and it was pretty good. Afterward we only had about 30 minutes until we had to meet back up with Olga, one of our teachers who was going to show us more stuff. We walked around a bit, some people went shopping and a couple people got some gelato. I was on the hunt for a cannoli and we finally found some tiny ones at a bakery. Olga took us to the Palazzo Vecchio that was very lavishly decorated. Also there, was a platinum and diamond encrusted skull that was a contemporary art piece. It was a literal skull, that belonged to a person at one point covered in stones. It was in a glass case and even had an alarm. None of us really understood how it was art but it was really really cool. The skull was super sparkly and kind of looked like it should be shrunk and worn as jewelry on Bret Michaels. After that we saw a chocolate festival and everyone freaked out so of course we wandered around there for a bit. They had all kinds of bark, truffles, chocolate covered fruit and......CANNOLI! Huge cannoli with chocolate filling. We were in absolute heaven. After the sugar fix, it was time to go home and we were sufficiently exhausted! Our next field trip is to Siena!