Miami

I cannot believe it’s already a week into October!! Where has the time gone?? I sill can’t come to grips with the reality that I am living in another country. I’ve heard that you finally get comfortable with everything about a week before you leave. Sounds about right. This weekend I was supposed to be in Venice, but a train strike stopped that plan. Thanks train workers, you probably should have asked me before you did that one…just saying. But, it worked out ok, because I got to see a lot of “tourist” spots in Florence that I have been dying to see.

On Thursday (and actually, again on Friday and Saturday) there was mini Oktoberfest in the piazza below our school. The school smelled delicious for three days!! They had a ton of booths from Germany and Switzerland, and a few from France. There was lots of German beer (of course!) and the best giant pretzels in the world, and giant wheels of cheese (that actually smelled gross…I know, blasphemy for a McCarty to say…) and a whole pig on a spit, LOTS of wiener schnitzel and sauerkraut, and really awkward booths that sold wooden porcupines. But, it was really fun to go walk around and smell everything and see all the fun, crazy drunk people dancing to German music.

The rest of the weekend we spent time hitting all the hot spots. We finally finished seeing the Accademia (David is one big nude dude…), finished the Uffizzi (Which I probably could spend four more days in and still not be able to take everything in), the Medici Chapel, and San Lorenzo Church. We wanted to go out to the Medici Villas on the outskirts of town, but we didn’t really know what bus to get on and we were not brave enough to just jump on a random one. Plus it was a dreary, rainy weekend, and I wanted to take pictures because it’s so beautiful out there. There are still a ton of churches that I want to see, since that’s where a lot of the most famous Italian Renaissance art is located. You have to pay to go into them, and our card that gets us into all the museums for free doesn’t get us into the churches. But, we have discovered that if you go to mass there, they can’t charge you money. It might be a little blasphemous to only go to mass to admire the art, but it is very interesting to sit in on mass in Italian. I love that they end all the services with “Andiamo in Pace” (Go in Peace). I feel like it sounds so much more elegant in Italian. Well, really, I think everything sounds better with an Italian accent. Even the Italian men who yell, “Hello, kiss me!” in the markets. They don’t really mess around anymore; they go straight for the direct pick up lines.

Next weekend is the Amalfi Coast, which I am so excited about!! I will have to add a ton of pictures to my blog from it. I hope the weather is good. We have been having a bout of nasty weather here. I hear November if ever worse…boo. It has gotten very cold here. Well, cold for a Texan, my Indiana roommate makes fun of me leaving the house in my giant coat every day. During the day it’s not bad because the sun is usually out, but in the mornings and at night it gets pretty chilly. This weekend was especially bad though because the rain came in as well.

My host parents invited us to have dinner with them on Saturday (because we don’t eat with them on the weekends usually) and we were supposed to make a desert for them. So, we chose to make banana bread because they both have “a little bit of diabetes,” as they like to say. It came out really good, considering we weren’t really sure if the ingredients we were putting in were actually right considering the writing on the boxes was in Italian. They have been fattening me up good! The other night they had to go to a dinner party, so they left us a “cold dinner,” which I didn’t think sounded good and was actually kind of scared of. But, this was seriously the best salad I have ever had in my life. It had a layer of proscuto, then a layer of lettuce (but not the normal Italian lettuce, because this had small, sweet leaves, and usually the Italians use arugola…haha Rach) then a layer of corn, then some cheese (of course, because we are in the land of cheese), then it was topped with olive oil and lemon. The most perfect salad on the face of the planet!! Then they fed us these unidentifiable fruits. They are green, with a leafy stem. But you eat them like an apple, and they taste awful!! We have been trying to figure out what they are, but there’s no translation in the dictionary, so I’m pretty sure they don’t exist in America.





Oh...and here's a photo of Mauro...