Week 1

Tuesday, our first full day in Florence, consisted mainly of orientation before they moved us in to our apartments. At 4:00 the three of us checked out of the hotel (I had finally received my carry on bag just in time!) and were taken to our apartment on Via Ghibellina, 81. They had given us a packet with our key and so we open the main wooden door, and its actually a smaller door within it that we walk into (I don't have any pictures of the door right now) and then we open a gate into this beautiful courtyard area. We start to walk up the first flight of stairs we see, and then realize we didn't really know where our apartment was. We finally look in our packet and see that there are instructions that tell us which is the right door to the flight of stairs we need to get to. It was a bit difficult for us to carry our bags up there so we decided walk up to open our door first. However, when we tried to put the key in, the door would not budge! We had no clue how to open our door! So we had to call the Fairfield people to send someone to our apartment to show us..... and I'm sure they thought we were at the wrong door (which we weren't)

 front entrance

 waiting for help with our door by the staircase

 our courtyard (those windows above just happen to be our living room windows!!!)

 Sooo finally we got inside and dragged our bags upstairs... our apartment is beautiful! I'll just show you a picture of our living room...

So the rest of the day just consisted of unpacking and getting connected to wifi (I restrained myself from going on the internet till I was done unpacking). We then walked over to Pizzaiuolo for dinner which was so good! And the waitress was so friendly!

Later, we walk right across the street to this great bar called Salamanca with Melissa, Jen, Molly, Meghan, and Margo (who all live together further down on our street) and ended up getting free tequilla shots! Fun way to start off our evening-- and great way to get us to come back, we've gone there almost every night since! We then went to this club called Red Garter, where I met up with this guy Mike who does Bus2Alps promotions and he took us to this bar behind it called Nyeema (sp) and showed us Secret Bakery--- but we didn't actually go there and I forgot where it is. Afterwards his friends took us to another club called Twice.... and that was an interesting experience... it kind of reminds me of Maingate but with all townies because the Italian guys were so aggressive and would try to take you towards the bathroom or something... it was just weird and a little sketchy for me but my two roomates had a lot of fun! It wasn't as awful as I'm probably describing it, and I'll probably end up going there again since it's 2 minutes away from us.

Well, that was our first day outside the hotel... I'll be writing about the rest of the week in my next post! Ciao!