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.