Italia!

holy cow. phenomenal, I think, might be the only word to describe Italy right now. About what I thought it'd be. I'm at Janelle's house, and she lives on the second floor of an Italian villa! No big deal, you just look out her kitchen window onto a vineyard and an olive grove and other villas up on the hills of Tuscany. wow.
ok let's start at the beginning of the week. when I got home from Morocco, my French host family was SO nice...it was great to see them, and it made me realize that part of me is really going to miss France when I go back to the US. We had a pancake dinner night for Camille, and I gave her the birthday presents I had for her from Morocco and the US. It was relaxing to be back at my French home, and in Marseille, and I can't wait to really make sure to get as much of the experience in as possible before I go back home, since Marseille really is beautiful now that the weather has gotten better.
Monday morning Nora and I left really early on the train with a slight delay from the train and transportation strikes...alwayyys in France haha. they do love their strikes. so we got going and made it to Nice, where we ate lunch on the beach and walked around the markets and the downtown area, which was SO cute and really picturesque. Then we got back on train after train after train until we reached Pisa, where we got stuck at 11:30 at night looking for our train to Florence. our previous train had lied about the time of arrival, so we got to Pisa too late to catch a train to Florence, only a bus, which left at 1:15 am and cost 50 euro. sooo, we decided to stay in a hotel for 80 euro, and we also ate a really amazing calzone (my first food in Italy, which absolutely held up to expectations). We used emergency funding to stay in Pisa overnight, which actually ended up being awesome because our hotel was nice and it was really good to get a good nights sleep. Nora and I were both really tired from Morocco and hadn't slept much because of prepping for the Italy trip, so it was good for both of us to get some extra sleep. We also woke up the next morning to hands down, the best continental breakfast a hotel has ever provided me. Italian coffee, which i loved (if you know me, you know I don't like coffee very much, especially since 'coffee' here is espresso), cereal, nutella and croissants, juice, pastries, yogurt, muffins, you name it. We took some to go for lunch haha, and headed out for a brief visit to the leaning tower, which we both LOVED. Pisa was so cute and we came into the touristy area from the opposite direction from the rest of the world, so we missed out on all the crowds and fake, lame tourist shops and stuff, so we had a great experience at the leaning tower. We got back in time to take the train to Florence where we met Rose and got AMAZING paninis with her.
Nora and I spent the afternoon walking around Florence, and we toured the Santa Maria Novella cathedrale, which was my first experience in a huge cathedrale with all of the mosaics and paintings, and it was absolutely stunning. I was not allowed to take pictures, which is a shame, but I bought a book that explains all the paintings and includes pictures so I can always remember. I also think my dad would be SUPER interested in reading about all the stories, so that will be fun to talk about when I come home. After the cathedrale we went back to Rose's and made a fantastic dinner of pesto pasta with zucchini and gnocchi with 4 cheese sauce. um, yeah. nora and I basically owned the kitchen for a few hours, and it was SO good. we also drank Chianti wine, a specialty of the region, and then some Lemoncello, which costs about 5 euros here...crazyyy. there was a Beatles band playing at the bar across the street, so Rose and her roommates and Nora and I went out there for a few hours, which was really fun.
Wednesday morning we got up early enough to get into the Dome (duomo) before all of the crowds, and it was also fantastic. we climbed up it, so we got to see all of the paintings on the ceiling and then we went outside onto a balcony where you had a 360 degree view of Florence. then we hit up a market recommended to us by Rose and wandered around for over an hour looking for reasonably priced pizza, since it's all marked up for the tourists. we also tried to find/get into a beautiful garden, but they wanted to charge us 10 euros to get in, so we gave up and just ate our pizzas on the sidewalk, which ended up being in the sun and on this cute little old Italian road. we were in the oldest section of Florence, so there were all these little cut through roads with archways. it was so cool, even tho we missed out on the gardens...we found our own fun in Florence, which I just loved. it was nice to just explore and walk down by the river and see where we ended up.
i dropped Nora off at the station to go to Rome, and I hung out for a while until Rose got back from class. we went out to eat at this incredible Italian restaurant where i tried 5 different kinds of pasta which were all equally delicious. there was penne vodka, then some sort of pasta with broccoli white sauce, then a meat sauce and also gnocchi in there somewhere. afterwards we split a tuscany balsamic steak...yeah, right up there with some of the best steak i've ever had. i'm thinking it's just under the filet mignon from Tucker's down in LBI...definitely amazing. we got gelato afterwards that was also great, and then watched a movie and just had a night in.
this morning we got up and saw the David statue, which was almost as cool as my David in reality, haha, maybe a little cuter... ;) hehe, just kidding! i don't understand why they put such a beautiful sculpture with anything else in a museum, since after i saw the David i wanted no part of any other sculptures or artwork. everything else just didn't hold a candle. as Rose says, you think it's just a sculpture, how great can it be, but then you get there and see it and are literally awestruck. it was incredible. props to michaelangelo.
so now I'm at Janelle's, and I'm staying here until Saturday night. I plan to just walk around and enjoy myself and relax in the beautiful tuscan countryside. tomorrow we're going for a walk in the morning and then making dinner tomorrow night I think. tonight we're going out for pizza - mmm! she is SO nice, and her villa is amazing.
Italy definitely held up my expectations, and I am absolutely coming back here to see other parts of Italy, hopefully when I know a little more of the language. Btw it was very difficult to switch back to English when I first got here, so I guess that's a good sign, but was a little weird and frustrating at first, haha. I suppose the immersion program is really doing its job!