Florence - Day 1 - June 30

 When we woke up the next morning I got to meet everyone else in my program and also Chiara, my program director who was SO CUTE!! She told us everything we needed to know about our apartments, who our roommates were, and where we were going to live. My roommate I found out was Carrie and my other apartment roommates are Miyon, Jon, Amer, and a girl going to another school Liz. We jumped in taxi's and headed off to our new apartments. We got there and lugged all of our bags up 2 flights of stairs to find our cute (and pretty good sized) apartment! There are 4 bedrooms, a kitchen, dinning room, living room, and two bathrooms. It sounds large, but everything is miniature sized however. Once Chiara checks us in, we head off to see the city. We bring our laptops with us because we had to go find the interent. The only other thing we had to do the rest of the day was to meet at 3:30 for our official tour of Florence. Which meant that we had 3 hours until then...plenty of time to find an internet place, right? Ha...we were lost for the full 3 hours and never found the place so we had to go another day without internet and connection to all of our homelives.
 Eventually we make it to our meeting place and before the tour begins I officially get my first pizza for lunch (salami pizza) and gelato (mango and berries)!! The tour was unbelievable. There were so many things to see and so much history behind everything that was around us. Even if the building was not necessarily historic, it was still majestic and built like it was a cathedral. However, the Duomo (the cathedral in Florence) is beyond words. It is impossible to describe how huge and amazing it is to see. Pictures do not really do any of the buildings justice, but it is all I can do to share with everyone at home! We get to walk around the entire city and figure out the streets and the shops and the people. There are surprisingly a lot of American students in Florence so there are not many people that do not speak Italian and English. By the end of the tour we all wanted to see the nightlife. So we continued walking to find music in the streets, a ballet going on in one of the piazza's (square, meeting place), and some pubs that were open too! It was so cool to see how much there was going on around us all for free just for the pure entertainment. Although I did get into a little scuffle with the guitarist because I tried to take his CD by donating 5 euros and taking one...well apparently that was not enough. He was yelling through the microphone that they were not free and this was his job. I was so embarrased that I ended up giving it back. He wanted 15 euros, but I said he wasn't worth that much!! Haha it was a good first night even with that small argument.