Week before Midterms & Sha Sha visiting!

The week before midterms was quite eventful and I never got a chance to write about it. So Starting Tuesday October 14th the girls and I went to the Italian Opera "Tosca." It was absolutely beautiful, not to mention the first opera I'd ever been to, so I loved it! The girls and I had fun getting dressed up for it, and as I learned in my intercultural comm class Opera is very big in Italy. Italians love getting dressed up and spending a night at the opera. It lasted about 4 hours...so it was very long but so amazing. Then Even more exciting...Shannon got to Florence on Wednesday night! So Marci, Katie, and I went to the train station to wait for Sha and her friend Charlene. When they got here we were all pretty tired so we just came back to my apartment and caught up for a little while. It was such a good feeling. Both of us were crying at the train station when we first saw each other too it just seemed so unreal!

On Thursday, October 16th, Hannah, Kristen, and I went to a ballet at the theatre. We’re all members of the dance club here so we got free tickets which was really cool. The ballet was so beautiful and it was based around relationships and World War 2. The dancing was really contemporary and completely up my alley so I couldn’t stop smiling. And I was doing that thing where my leg or arm moves randomly because I feel like I should be dancing…I know im a dork hahahha. Before the ballet Shannon, Charlene, and I ate at the Lorenzo restaurant. Sha and I had a lot of time to just catch up on life which was really nice.

The next day we shopped at some of the street markets and then Sha and Charlene went to the Uffizi while my roommates and I went to the Boboli gardens to study for midterms for a couple hours. The gardens are huge and really pretty. We hiked up to a higher part of the gardens that looked out over Florence, and then we just laid out towels on the grass. It was seriously so relaxing and I felt like I could focus so much up there. Afterwards, the roomies, Sha, Charlene, and I got gelato from De Neri and then just walked around Florence. That night we all went to Tijuanas…the Italian style Mexican restaurant. They have very good food, but it’s definitely not like the Mexican food back home hahaha and they have very good pina coladas and fruit smoothies which are delish as well! The next day the girls’ train left around 12 so I took them to the train station and we just said a quick goodbye and they were off. It was so great seeing Sha and so fun catching up on life! It’s crazy because no matter how long it’s been sense we’ve seen each other or where we are in the world everything feels the same. I love it!

The next day all 6 of us roomies, Katie’s boyfriend Nick, Rebekah, and Kristen’s friend Trisha went to the PERUGIA CHOCOLATE FESTIVAL! It was so great! Seriously all of us are chocolate addicts so we were in heaven! It’s an international chocolate festival so several streets were completely packed and very difficult to get through. They had chocolate carvers there and everything. And we would all just wait next to the guys carving the statues because they would fill bags with all of the extra chocolate and give it away for free! I think I ate way way too much that day, but I had some amazing hot chocolate, a chocolate covered banana, and some peanut butter fudge that was very yummy (still not as good as moms though)!

The following week of school we all had midterms and they were stressful as usual. Most of my midterms were written like flamenco I had to write 10 short answer essays on the history of gypsies and flamenco in Spain, History was 3 in class essays, and communications consisted of 24 short answer questions 2 of which were full pages, oh and cooking was 10 short answer as well. Italian was the only one I had a regular test in and that was slightly stressful. Blarf anyway, I think the part that was craziest for my roommates and I was that we were all leaving Thursday after our last tests on a week long adventure in the UK. So we just had a lot of packing and planning of little things to do as well as study and take finals. But the good news was that as soon as the tests were over we were all on cloud 9 and soooo excited for our trip!