Week 10

The Monday that classes started again my sister and her friends from Brighton visited Florence. It was good timing because the stress from midterms was finally over, and I wasn't going to be having a lot of work that week. It also happened to be a beautiful week, sunny and in the 70's!

Morgan and me on top of the Duomo!

I met them on Tintori since they took a bus from the SMN Station, and I showed them where their hostel was. It happened to be literally two minutes away from me, which was perfect for meeting up with them to take them around for the next few days. After checking in to the hostel, I took them to Pino's which they loved, and we got gelato from Neri. We walked with our gelato to the Ponte Vecchio so they could all take pictures. Afterwards, we all went into H&M and a few of them bought stuff before heading back to the hostel to change to climb the Duomo.

I really enjoyed taking them up to the top, and we took lots of pictures and then sat in the sun again, just like I did the last time I climbed it. For dinner, I wanted to take them to Oibo, but for some reason it was closing early, so Ashley and I tried to take them to Gusta Pizza only to see that they were closed to. We ended up going to Il Gato e la Volpe, where I got four cheese gnocchi. They all enjoyed their food and enjoyed tasting gnocchi, which a lot of them hadn't had before. Afterwards, we all got wine before going to YAB. It was really fun having a big group again, and my sisters friends were really nice.



The next day I had class till 4:15, so my sister and her friends decided to walk around the San Lorenzo market. They were going to go to the David, but since they couldn't get student discounts, they ended up not going. However, Ashley and I met them around 5 to walk over to Piazzale Michelangelo, where we sat and listened to music while enjoying the view. I had booked a wine tasting for us with Pino at Pozzo Divino at 7, so we headed back down there at 6:30. The wine tasting was so much fun! We got a lot of food such as cheese, bread, prosciutto, salami, oil, and really good balsamic vinegar. The wine we had was Chianti Classico 2008, Bianco Della Lanciola 2010, and Poggio Al Ginepri 2009, another red. It was cool because I understood how to taste and analyze the wine, and my sister and her friends seemed to really enjoy it. Pino let us have as much wine as we wanted and we ended up getting a bit tipsy. We also ended up taking pictures with him and he had us do a "drunk test" where we stand in a funny way to see if we are sober enough to have good balance. We all were pretty tired from the day and ended up not going out that night.

Me, Jordana, Pino, and Morgan after the wine tasting!

 On Wednesday, I had class for most of the day so my sister and her friends did their own thing again. I'm pretty sure they really just went to the market again to buy more things. I ended up going to the Uffizi Gallery for Art History and we saw so many things. I didn't realize that the Birth of Venus was there, and so that was pretty cool to see. I met my sister afterwards and we all went to Oibo for dinner with Ashley. That night we went to Kikuya and Twice.

Thursday, my sister and her friends left to continue their travels. My sister has a whole month of Spring Break which is pretty cool but must be exhausting. Nothing much happened on Thursday and we didn't end up going out, although Ashley, Katie and I went to Tijuana (Note: Tijuana might have been on Friday night... I didn't write this down, whoops).

Friday morning I went to pick up my new cell phone, which I had to get since I lost mine in YAB on Monday. Afterwards, I went to the library for the first time to get research on Leonardo Da Vinci's Mona Lisa, since I had a presentation and paper due for Art History that coming Wednesday. Ashley had wanted to go to the park, but I just really knew I wanted to get my research done because we were going away that weekend and Bri was coming to visit on Sunday. Luckily, I was pretty productive, and stayed in the library for about 2 and a half hours!

We had a chill night that night because Saturday and Sunday we were going on the make-up trip with FUA to Perugia, Assisi, Siena, and San Gimignano, which I will talk about in my next post!