Ok I am a huge slacker. We have been back from spring break in Florence for 2 and a half weeks and this is the first time I have even thought to write a blog post about it. Oops. Florence was seriously amazing! I couldn't have asked for a better, more relaxing spring break. This time I traveled with a much smaller group, just me and 2 friends. We set out Saturday afternoon and took the train to Paris where we slept on the floor in the Charles de Gaulle airport so we didn't have to pay for a hotel. This whole me sleeping in weird random places to save a few bucks is starting to become an unwelcome habit. We somehow managed to actually sleep for a couple hours before it was time to get up, buy some airport food, and head to the terminal. After a long stop in Switzerland and several hours of playing bang, kill, marry to pass the time we finally made it to Florence around 6:30pm that night (22 hours after getting on the first train.) We were lucky enough to stay with friends who are studying abroad in Florence and after getting settled we went to dinner at a real Italian restaurant! Everyone knows that the food in Italy is amazing but we had no clue what we were in for during the week in Florence. The first night I had the best lasagna I have ever tasted. Throughout the week we took advantage of market that was held right behind the apartment we stayed at to buy handmade fresh pasta, fresh pesto, and real mozzarella cheese (no shredded sargento cheese this week). We also found some of the best cappuccino I have ever had at this little place called OK bar which is right by the duomo. We went there so often that the waiters started giving us free pastries. We also found the best gelato I have ever had. Im pretty sure we got gelato everyday actually. In addition to eating a ton in Florence we also explored the city quite a bit. We spent a lot of time just walking around taking pictures. One of my favorite spots was Piazza Michaelangelo. The piazza looks over the entire city and you can see all of the mountains in the distance. It was beautiful. We also saw the David (which is HUGE) and the Duomo (also HUGE) and some random churches. Every church we saw was incredible and filled with paintings and sculptures and amazing architecture.
I was very happy to be able to practice a bit of my Italian as well! I think my proudest moment of the trip was when I was able to ask a woman at a cafe, in Italian, if it was possible for us to just have a coffee without ordering any food and was able to completely understand her reply! Im sure there were some grammatical errors and my accent was atrocious but I was happy nonetheless. It has become more difficult for me to speak Italian after this semester in France. My brain always mixes English, French, and Italian into some weird combination. I'm sure it will all work itself out once I get back into Italian classes in fall.
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| Ponte Vecchio Bridge |
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| Duomo by night |
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| Gelato break |
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| I swear there are more vespas than people in Florence |
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| Taken from Pizza Michaelangelo |
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| Our amazing dinner that we made ourselves! |
Overall Florence was wonderful! I would definitely go back. My only problem with the city was there was a bit too much English there! There were a lot of tourists and tons of American students speaking english all around us which I'm not ready for yet. I enjoy hearing other languages far too much to go back to hearing english everywhere already. Other than that it was a perfect relaxing spring break, Italian style.
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