Sorry I haven’t blogged in a while, this past week has been very chaotic! I’ll try my best to remember everything I’ve been doing…
Two Fridays ago we took a day trip to Siena and San Gigamnano which were both beautiful! They were about 1.5-2 hours away by bus. In Siena, our tour guide took us around and showed us some pretty views from the city, churches and the main piazza (square) where they have a medieval horse race called Palio di Siena twice a year.
We ate traditional Tuscan almond cookies (Siena is known for them) called ricciarelli. These were the melt-in-your-mouth, eat-tiny-bites-so-it-lasts-as-long-as-possible cookies. Delicious!
We had lunch at this cute little restaurant and had local cuisine, which included local wine and pate spread, which was surprisingly good (before I knew what it was). Here's a picture of my roommate Kelly and I enjoying our lunch.
Then we headed to San Gigamnano, which is smaller town than Siena.
I liked it better since there were not as many people there. We saw Kelly Ripa there. We walked around & learned about the town and walked in a church. Some of my friends and I walked up a huge hill to find a gorgeous view, where we then had a wine tasting of some local wines. Yum. Perfect way to end the day (and endure the bus ride back home). Here is the aftermath of our wine tasting.
The rest of the weekend was kind of a letdown, but we made the best of it. We were planning to go to Grave (grah-veh) on Saturday, a town about an hour train ride outside of Florence. On Saturdays they have this open air market that is suppose to have some great local goods. They also boast Italy’s most entertaining butcher, so my friends and I were going to buy some entertaining meat from this guy. Then on Sunday we were going to go to another town called Lucca, which is about a 2 hour train ride outside the city. It’s not a tourist spot, which is great since there are very few people around. I really want to get to know all different parts of Italy while I’m here, not just the places that everyone in the world knows about. But just our luck, we woke up on Saturday morning to pounding rain for the ENTIRE day. Bad news bears. The only upside was that I got to sleep in for the first time here, so I caught up on my long-overdue jet lag sleep.
We made up for our lame day by going to an electronic discoteque called Space (cue neon strobe lights & techno music). It was insanely fun. Almost everyone from our program went out and had a great time. The cover was 10 euro, but that included a drink so you basically paid for one expensive drink, but it was worth it. There were two huge floors that played different music, one floor was pop/hip hop and the other was techno. Florentines definitely know how to party. My roommate Kelly and I found these tall platforms and danced on them all night. It was a great night, we’re definitely going there again. Here is the view from our killer platform!
On Sunday, instead of our Lucca trip, we woke up to pounding rain AGAIN for the entire day. I guess it was okay, since the rest of the weekends from there on out would be nonstop traveling.
More to come on my wonderful chaos later,
XOX
Hill
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