On Saturday Anna and I decided to go to Florence because not only do we love it there, but I needed shorts and sandals reallyyyyy bad. For some reason I didn’t take the changing of the seasons into consideration while packing. Once we arrived we went to a pizza place called Yellow Bar, a restaurant that Anna’s old roommate told her to go to. She raved about the veggie pizza and she was right, it was delicious! Afterward we went and did a little shopping and I got my spring essentials that I was missing. We had a huge craving for crepes so we went back to the crepe place that our friend Jen took us to when we had met up with her the last time we visited Florence. After satisfying our craving for nutella and banana crepes (and basically licking the plate clean) we took a walk over to Ponte Vecchio, which is a bridge that goes over the river that has lots of cute shops around it. Anna’s old roommate had interned at a leather shop near there and we went by and took a look at what they had. After that we just walked around and enjoyed looking at the shops and took a walk over the bridge to look for the Boboli gardens. Unfortunately you had to pay to get into the gardens and it was starting to get cold so we figured we would just do more shopping to get warm! On our way back to the main shopping areas we saw a cute little shop and picked up some really cute leather bracelets, that way we fulfilled the necessity of buying leather in Florence! Haha! By this time it was almost time for dinner and we had made a reservation at a place Jen had told us about before called….Tijuana! Yes, that’s right people, we got Mexican food! I don’t even really like Mexican food that much but I was stoked. We went the whole 9 yards: mango margaritas, chips and salsa (That we had to pay for! Ridiculous, but worth it) and I got a spicy chicken quesadilla. After we were pleasantly full from Mexican food it was time to walk back to the train station and go home!
The next day we had a field trip to Todi! Todi is a small hill town about 30 minutes or less from Orvieto and is where our program director, Alba, is from! There were only 9 of us that went because a lot of people needed to write papers for a class. It ended up being a great size and allowed us to have a fun girls day. Alba took us on the trip and showed us a basilica and took us to a museum with things found in Todi. It was really interesting to hear things from her point of view because she had grown up there. For lunch she took us to her childhood home that was gorgeous! They live upstairs, in an apartment style building but it is really big and has a big huge terrace that has a gorgeous view of the country side. It looked like a scene out of Under the Tuscan Sun. Her mom, Caterina, made us a huge lunch. For appetizers we had these little breads with cheese and meat, asparagus and onion quiche-type things, and about 3 types of pizza (that she made in her outdoor pizza oven!). Then she made lasagna and veggie lasagna (for our vegetarians), both were phenomenal, and then she brought out chicken nuggets that she breaded with spices and lemon and potatoes. For dessert we had a chocolate and cookie cake-type thing and a pie/tart with her homemade marmalade. I was SO full that I could barely move. I didn’t even eat dinner because I was so full. You can imagine how much we all loved it and it wasn’t even just the food, it was so amazing to have a real Italian meal made by an Italian! It was a nice little bonding experience for us with Alba too, since she doesn’t always go on the field trips with us and we don’t usually have so little people in our groups. After lunch we rolled ourselves out and over to a couple churches and then we took a little nature walk back to the bus. It was such a lovely day! My camera died so I didn’t take any pictures but a lot of the other girls did so I will steal their pictures and put them on facebook soon! I’ll try to put one on this post sometime soon too! Our friends Grace and Sarah and their friend (they’re studying in Spain) are coming to visit us tomorrow and I leave for Belgium to see Kevin on Thursday!! Such an exciting week!
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