Some More Italy

On Saturday, we went into Florence for the first time. It was a pretty big thing, since we are going to be spending the majority of our free time there. Florence is only six miles away from our Villa, and the closest big city. We started off by touring a church on a hill overlooking Florence. This was the first church that we visited that also had a graveyard. I was extremely excited and wanted to visit it, but we only had a few minutes to explore before we moved on. Thankfully, one of my professors told me the the Experiencing the City class (which I am in) will visit the same church and check out the graveyard. I was extremely happy. From there we walked into Florence, starting on the "Other side" and crossing the river to "This side" (these are the names the Italians gave to the two sides of Florence). We pretty much got a quick "Here's this building, this church, and this how you get back to the bus stop" before we got to explore the city on our own. The group that I ended up with decided that we were going to postpone the visits to the cathedral and museums for another time, and just walk around, taking in the city and getting to know it better. During our exploration, we found an excellent Gelateria (Italian ice cream store), the expensive district (with Gucci, Louis Viton, Guess, etc), and obtained the directions to a nightclub in Florence from some locals. We also ate some EXCELLENT pizza. And out of all the brilliant and cool things we found and discovered, there was one thing we could not find, as hard and desparately as we searched: a bathroom. It is not polite to walk into a cafe or restaurant to use the bathroom without first buying something, but we couldn't find a sign for the public "W.C."s either! By this point, we were getting tired and thinking about heading back home, so we decided to hold it. Unfortunatly, getting back to the bus stop was a bit of a problem; there was construction where the bus stop used to be, so it was moved. In addition, we had to walk through the market to get to the area of the bus stop, so we made numerous "pauses" while we were walking. One of these pauses was my doing: I saw an absolutely gorgeous scarf and had to get. A nice part chasmere, part silk scarf for only 6 euro. I was happy. To end this story happily, we found the bus stop, went back to the Villa, took a nap, freshened up (it was HOT), ate some dinner in Sesto, and got ready for out night out!