Oh thee espresso!

January 14, 2011

Today was the last day of orientation and all of the girls had a special meeting at 9:30 with Petra and Niccoletta and they talked about different ways to say safe and healthy because traveling anywhere as a foreigner is always going to be more difficult for girls than boys. Florence is a very safe city, but they gave us just different pointers of things to look out for. After that all of the boys were supposed to meet us there for Academic Orientation which was run by Marcello and we were introduced to different program heads and such. After that all of the Honors students were supposed to stay behind because we had a separate Honors orientation. Marcello basically just told all of us Honors kids that he was proud to have us there and to determine which class you wanted to take as an honors course and inform your teacher you want to do so…nothing to difficult.

All of my roommates and I stayed at the school because we still don’t have internet and we needed to do different things because the school coordinators are e-mailing us important information that everyone else but us are getting. By the time we started looking around on the internet we realized we were STARVING so we set out to find this restaurant that Petra (the librarian) recommended. The restaurant ended up being extremely intimidating because Petra said in her e-mail with the recommendation that their pizzas were really cheap etc. etc, but during lunch hours they have a limited menu of 3 options for each course/side and you have to pick one of the options and the service wasn’t friendly in explaining it and it was mess! But I ended up choosing the option of a first course, side, water, and espresso. I had lasagna which was so delicious! And I chose french fries as my side because I couldn’t understand the other choices and tried the espresso which was SO STRONG! Literally as soon as we all drank it we were like we need to rush home to use the bathroom. hahaha. After we did get home and go to the bathroom Marissa and I locked ourselves in our room and planned a budget to stick to..it was quite refreshing and a good idea to have set figures in mind and not overspend on little things.

Sarah and Jackie (the 2 girls from the other apartment) suggested we all cook dinner together and they said they would plan it, buy the stuff, and then we would just divide the cost among the 7 of us. Welllll it ended up being pricey-er than we expected, but it still was amazingly delicious! They chose to make fry chicken, peppers, onions and make quesadillas out of it and bought tortillas, salsa, multiple kinds of cheese (fresh cheese that we had to grate), lettuce, and tomato. We had a ton of food and it was amazingly delicious and it was also a good time getting to know the girls because we kinda separate into our two apartments and don’t communicate much.

After dinner me, Marissa, Lauren, and Danielle started getting ready because we made plans with the comm/journalism kids made plans to go out to The Fish Pub. We thought it would be fun with all of us, but little did we know that there would be drama among the group and the night ended up revolving around two people, but one person in particular. It was highly annoying, but we tried having a good time! We also ended up going to another pub called the Old Stove. I’m not quite sure how much alcohol costs at bars in the States, but my roommate Lauren ended up paying 10 euro for two beers which we thought was super expensive. Once we got back home us four sat around the kitchen table and just laughed until the night grew old.