January 26, 2007

We made the best meal last night. Really, the best. All of the food here is so fresh and so good - it was just chicken and veggies but it was amazing and I'm sure that if I had made it at home it wouldn't have been near as good. We also found an actually good bottle of wine for 2 euros. I know, it can't be good if it's that cheap but it is, really.

The last few days we've all just been getting into the class schedule thing. I am going to have an amazing ass by the end of the semester, the walk to campus is a 20 minute hill, then to get to the actual academic building you pretty much walk up a small mountain. So yeah, I've been running around buying books etc, but I'm excited about this weekend. Tonight we're checking out a jazz club, then tomorrow my program is taking a trip to Siena. Next weekend Erin and I are going to Rome, then it's just madness and traveling for the rest of the semester.

January 24, 2007

Almost forgot that it was winter. Today is cold and rainy.

I went to a chocolate festival the other night. We got free samples of chocolate and a free cappucino and free tea. Doesn't get much better than that.

Running down to the post office to get my Permesso so I can legally live here.

I love my photography and psych classes. The others are fine.

January 21, 2007


So this is pretty much the first time I've sat since arriving. There's so incredibly much to do here. Like I said before, on Friday Erin and I walked up to Fiesole. The center of town was a little dead when we got there - things here close down in the middle of the day and don't open again until dinnertime, which starts around 7 or 8. We walked around town and took this smallish road out into the country, past gorgeous villas and olive groves, just generally exploring. On the way back down the hill we stopped for lunch/dinner at this cute little cafe, where we had the sweetest waitress. We got this huge assortment of food - a bowl of different vegetables, a block of cheese and fruit, a plate of bread with some different kinds of spread, and a huge pile of sliced meat, along with a basket of bread and the most delicious olive oil. Seriously, a ton of food. At the end of the meal there were still piles of meat left, so our waitress tried to explain to us in Italian that we could bring it home to make sandwiches, then brought us out extra bread and cheese and tomatoes, such a great experience.

Yesterday we spent a lot of time just walking around Florence. We checked out the Mercato Centrale, which takes up a couple of blocks and sells everything from purses to whole dead chickens (really, they look like those rubber ones) and pretty much anything else you could think of. I bought some really good olive oil, I've become a huge fan. We also went on a walking tour of our neighborhood with a bunch of other people from the program, which was mostly annoying because there were so many of us, and because we've pretty much gotten our neighborhood down by now, but we got free gelato at the end so all's good. Later later that night I went out to a few pubs with some of my roommates, which was fun, but Florence totally caters to the American student crowd (one pub we went to holds flip cup tournaments on Tuesdays and beruit on Thursdays), which I'd like to get away from. Further from the center of the city it's more Italian, better.

Today - more walking. We did a bus tour at 11 then spent the rest of the day basically getting lost. I bought a Eurorail pass, and we've planned of bunch of trips for the semester, which I'm really excited about, and I'll hopefully get to visit some Colby kids.


La Pietra, on campus.


Il Duomo.


On the way to Fiesole.


An olive grove, they're everywhere.


Florence at sunset, from Feisole.

January 19, 2007

Italy is beautiful.

I’m living in Piazza Isidoro del Lungo, right near Piazza della Liberta, in a third floor apartment. It’s really nice and huge and airy and great. It houses 10 other girls (big change from last semester) in 7 bedrooms, 3 bathrooms, a living room with a tiny study niche and fireplace, and a whole hallway of closets that we haven’t even begun to fill, even with 11 of us. A few of the bedrooms and the living room have small balconies that overlook a tiny courtyard. I have a single in the apartment, which is nice because it helps keep me sane among all this estrogen, and I have a window that looks out to the interior of the apartment building, so I can spy on all of our neighbors and judge them by the laundry they have drying out their windows.

NYU owns a villa (La Pietra) on the outskirts of the city - the city itself isn’t actually that big, it’s very walkable. The walk to La Pietra is only about 20 minutes, and there’s a bus line that runs from right around the corner up to campus, but the walk is really pretty so I think I’ll probably skip the bus unless it’s raining. The campus is gorgeous, all stereotypical Tuscan villas and gardens. There’s this really pretty, long gravel drive up to the main building that’s lined with tall skinny trees - it looks like a movie set. La Pietra itself is a historical landmark with 5 acres of gardens (we have a formal dance there at the end of the semester), and then there are also 4 other buildings on campus, which is where I’ll take most of my classes. My photography class meets in a different part of Florence, in a photography studio (imagine that), so this weekend I’ll try to figure out my way there.

Most of the people I’ve met are pretty nice. I’ve become pretty close with one of my roommates, Erin. We, and occasionally another roommate, have been spending a lot of time exploring Florence because being in the apartment for a long amount of time with this many people is a little wearing, not that we wouldn't be out wanding around anyway. Our first night we went to Il Duomo, which is about a five minute walk, and found a really cute gelato place, and decided that it’s completely acceptable to have gelato for dinner… The food here is generally delicious, lots of really fresh fruits and veggies, and really, really great bread and cheese. A crowd of us went out last night and spent about 3 hours eating dinner, pasta.

Today was our first really free day, we’ve had a few days of orientation, so Erin and I went to Fiesole, this really quaint little hillside town right outside of Florence. There’s a bus that goes up there, but we wanted to explore so we walked, which ended up taking a few hours. I loved, loved, loved it, the countryside here really is very, very beautiful. Pictures later.

I miss everyone, but I feel like this semester is going to go by much faster than I want it to and it won’t be long before I’m back in Maine.