and the world gets even smaller.

this weekend my best friend from home (alessandra, who is studying in london this semester) came to visit me in florence with her best friend, kaltra. they stayed with kaltra's friend from home, eileen, who is spending this semester here. we spent the whole weekend with my best friend from smith, breana. kaltra and alex's good friends from london were also here. along with about 15 other people that we knew from various other places. it was a weekend of best friends. 

it was almost surreal to have my best from from vermont and my best friend from smith with me in italy of all places. surreal and very fantastic. 

friday afternoon i wandered around with alex and kaltra and eileen, looking at piazza signoria and the duomo and the smith sede and various other things. we ate some delicious gelato and then headed home to get ready for the night. we met up with breana and lots of other smith girls to have aperitivo at moyo. i had a delicious fruity drink (turns out it was not a good idea....) and yummy snacks. afterward, we wanted to go sing karaoke at the american bar called the red garter but no one was there yet. breana, alex, kaltra and i headed back to eileen's apartment to hang out for a bit before trying again. when we got back to the red garter, we snagged a strawberry daquiri and sang two songs: first the spice girls with some other american girls and then n'sync with some american boys. after we had enough of that, we met up with kaltra and eileen and went to 21, a discoteca, where we danced our bums off til 3:30am.... oops! 

saturday, after sleeping in of course, breana and i went and met up with alex and the others to wander around the san lorenzo market before dinner. alex and i bought very cute rings (after MUCH haggling) and breana and i bought little flower-printed scarves like we've always wanted. oh, and alex bought a little leather bag just like mine and breana's so now we all match! for dinner alex, breana and i wandered over to my FAVORITE restaurant in florence, i tarocchi (the tarot cards) where i had a greek salad followed by AMAZING roast beef and roasted potatoes. so good. alex had carbonara and breana had delicious penne in spicy tomato sauce. after checking in and stopping by various places to see all the various people we knew in florence, we headed to braumiester for the usual saturday night beer (well in this case, raspberry lambic - yum!) 

this morning, the three of us met up to have american brunch at the diner. soooo good. i had eggs benedict and they each had chocolate chip pancakes. we spent the rest of the day wandering florence, going to the socks and tights store, popping in the anthropology museum, and wandering to santa maria novella and over the arno to see pitti palace. finally we had t say goodbye and watch everyone pile into the cab and head to the airport to go back to london. it was very sad..... good thing sometime in the next 6 weeks or so i will be heading over to london to see them all again!!!! 

overall it was a FABULOUS weekend! and it made the world feel very small in the most wonderful of ways!

off to do some translation! baci e abbracci as always!! 

PART ONE or the beginning of the best week ever

My apologies for being the worst blogger ever! It has been just about a week and I am pretty sure that in order to catch you all up, I would have to write a small novel.  Each day that I walk home, I think about all the profound and humorous things I have to say to you, yet when I get home, I am forever consumed by eating, napping, trying to read Italian literature and…. Facebook… and Skype. Therefore, I have now lost many of my insightful and moving ideas but please allow me to at least give a brief rundown of the past week.

Wednesday evening
Alessio’s birthday, therefore we obviously had to go out… The whole gang: approximately 12 Smith girls and our 4-6 Italian friends. Oh man. After spending a bit of time at a little English pub, we headed t Yab, otherwise known as You Are Beautiful. There may possibly be no words to describe this discoteca. It was packed with hundreds of very well dressed people and unlike Twice, the first discoteca we went to, people were not embarrassingly intoxicated or aggressive in their attempts to dance with you (for the most part…). There were neon blue and purple lights everywhere and a pretty divine assortment of music, ranging from Katy Perry to the hottest Italian pop music. We got there around 12.30am (mind you, we had class the next morning at 10.30am) and we left around 3.00am. It was fantastic and the small amount of tiredness that I felt the next morning was eliminated by the fact that we were looking at some really incredible art in art history! The one negative thing I can say about Yab is that while I was waiting in line at the bathroom, one very drunk girl threw up on the back of my legs…. Fortunately it appeared to be straight vodka and therefore I hardly noticed. Oh the joys of alcohol.

Thursday
Let’s see… Fascinating art history class in the morning followed by an afternoon of wandering Florence and shivering as the temperature last week barely reached 55. This may not be as miserable as the weather some of you have been experiencing, but given that the previous week had been in the 80s…. big change! After an amazing dinner with the fam, we (we being the entire gang, of course) went out to our favorite German pub (http://www.braumeister.it/). We weren’t out for long as our lack of sleep from the night before began to catch up. I believe That’s about it? Perhaps I am forgetting something but I don’t think anything overly exciting occurred on Thursday!  

Friday
Ooops! Slept until noon – I never do that! Friday I met Breana, Ali, Victoria and Alessio at the Sede to get some work done. By work what I really mean is that Ali, Breana and I IMed each other the entire afternoon sharing stories and planning the rest of the weekend….. oops! (Aspetta, let’s discuss how Breana just got an internship at the Uffizi working in the library where they are restoring and documenting the old manuscripts from, you know, the RENESSAINCE, that were damaged during the big flood in the 60s…. BRAVA RAGAZZA!) I stayed in Friday night because….