March 10, 2010
So we decided on last Friday to go to Fiesole, which is a little town on the hill that overlooks Florence. It’s too far to walk from where we are in Florence but only like a 15 minute bus ride. So on the bus I wanted to sit by the window on the side of the road with the really good view. Long story short, the bus drivers here are crazy. I stood up, my first mistake… he was going too fast and I couldn’t keep my balance, my purse hit the seat hard. Cracked my camera screen. I get off the bus to take a picture and all of a sudden I have this bright white screen…. Greaaattttttt… Good thing I have good friends that take pictures of Fiesole for me.. Anyways, so we were at Fiesole for a few couple of hours. It was very peaceful and relaxing. Of course what do we do when we first get there.. get a cappuccino of course..afterwards we walked up the hill and found a hidden church and a gorgeous panoramic view. Took lots of pictures with linzy’s awesome professionalized camera and ate lunch on a bench overlooking Florence. We stayed for a few hours and made our way back to the bus stop and back down the hill just in time to make some chicken for dinner and hang out with the girlies for a Friday night in the hostel.
Saturday morning we woke up early to catch the train going to San Gimignano. We decided it would be a good idea to get our train tickets right before we got on our train that morning instead of going to the train station after our trip to Fiesole on Friday evening. So we arrived early enough, went to the biglietti machines and typed in our destination. Well.. Antoinette found a discount button on one of the machines to get 30% off. Usually if you get a discount for a ticket you have to have some kind of evidential proof before you pay to be able to get the discount.. or at least some kind of promo code. Well it let us get the discount and we had no idea what it was for. Little did we know, you have to have some kind of train card to get the discount so when we got on the train and the employee came around to check our tickets we were shortly down 8Euro as a train fine for getting the 30% discount. First off this really sucked. Second off I only had 15Euro in my wallet before I left and had bought the first ticket with it and then another 8, I now have 2Euro to last me until I find an ATM.. gahh.. The things I don’t like about Italy.. So we finally arrived at the train station after a long sleepy trip on the train to find that we had to wait another hour for the bus from the train station to the actually town which, again, was too far to walk. Good thing it was a nice day with the sun shining down on where we were at the bus stop. We entertained ourselves for a while until the bus came. Now when you typically think of a city bus you think of a big uncomfortable bus with plastic seats facing each other with the metal bars hanging from the top as a handle for those standing. That’s what we were expecting and were surprised when a big blue coach bus came to the bus stop and said Destination: S Gimignano at the top. It was a comfy ride 
but a full bus. It’s not very comfortable to stand on those busses because of the limited space in the isle. So we got to our destination and walked around, got some gelato and found the famous gelato shop that everyone was raving about at Orientation, the one that won the world championship. Too bad it was closed. We went to the one next door, but honestly that one was amazing as well!!!! We walked up and down the hills or the city and found some really nice views, took some pictures, and found another panoramic view with a woman playing the harp in the piazza. It was calming and relaxing.. Though we managed to get yelled at by the woman because we were being too loud. I mean, it’s a group of 10 girls, we try to be quiet but as soon as all of us get involved in the same conversation we tend to louden up in volume. She was angry at us, but was extremely rude when asking us to quiet down. She could have been a little nicer. Anyways… we eventually left the view and made our way to the center of the town again. Took some more pictures.. went into a few stores.. and it started getting later.. and colder.. and we were ready to go home.
The thing about the little towns around Florence is that they are absolutely gorgeous with spectacular views but they get boring after a few hours. You can only do so much there and there is only so much gelato and cappuccino you can eat/drink before it’s time to go home.
Ok so that was last weekend.
This past Friday, march 5th, we woke up early.. well by early I mean around 11:30 to meet up with Rachel and Linzy and go venture to the “other side”… just meaning across the bridge. We wanted to find this American bakery that everyone was talking about; Mamma’s Bakery. It wasn’t too long of a hike but longer than something you would do on a day to day basis. So yeah, rundown: It’s an American bakery that serves American coffee, you get free refills of the coffee and they have bagels, muffins, cupcakes and other sorts of American breakfast foods. .. OK so cupcakes aren’t really breakfast foods, but other than that they also had some sandwiches and quiches. It was a really cozy little café and we sat at the table for about an hour without feeling the pressures of getting kicked out, which is a change here because usually if you just sit and talk after you’ve eating they give you little hints that they want you to leave after a while.. pretty much everyone there was American, and we kept seeing people we knew from LdM coming in so we knew word about the bakery was spreading fast. It takes away from the experience of being in Italy.. searching for breakfast foods that we get at home, but at the same time it’s been so long since anyone has had a bagel here that it just felt right.
After leaving the bakery we made our way home in anticipation to know that just in a few hours Jenn would be arriving from the US to come stay with us for the upcoming week!!! Exciting!! I was so happy to see her, and as soon as she got here it was such a strange feeling, well I guess absence of a feeling. It wasn’t different for her to be here, it was almost.. natural. It was almost like none of us had been apart for the past couple months (including break) I wish she could stay!!! But unfortunately she needs to return to cold, snowy UB. The night she arrived we decided to take her to our favorite place, Salamanca, for sangria and dinner. It was our first time eating dinner there and were mildly disappointed. I think we are just going to stick to sangria from now on. Later on that night Rachel and Kara met up with me at Salamanca and Anto and Jen headed home. We stayed out for a bit and met up with a few friends from Florence and hung out for a bit then headed home.
Sat morning we got up to head to CORTONA!! The setting of one of my favorite movies, Under the Tuscan sun. We tried to find the places where the movie was filmed but couldn’t really recognize any of the areas but we did run into a woman in a gelato place who lived in Cortona, was American, and lived in cortona while they were filming the movie. She actually studied abroad in Siena through Buff State (small world) and fell in love when in Italy, got married, had a kid, and lives in cortona. At the time of the movie she told us how she use to have a buzz cut (kind of weird) and she went to try and get a part for the movie. They offered her one and would have wanted her on the “gay and away” tour on the bus in the beginning of the movie, but at the time she just had a baby and was still breastfeeding. They couldn’t have the baby (with a babysitter) in the vicinity of the set while they would be filming for liability issues so she wasn’t put into the movie. That was kind of exciting though to see how they choose people to be in movies. Also it was a little upsetting to find out that the woman who wrote the movie was kind of stuck up in the town and caused a lot of conflict during the movie. Also sort of depressing to find that a lot of people in the town of cortona don’t really like her that much.. . Somehow we managed to get on the conversation topic of the differences in healthcare in Italy compared to the US and governmental procedures with Amanda Knox. It was an interesting conversation and it was interesting to hear about how things happened in Italy compared to what we here about in the US. All in all she was a really nice woman. She reminded me of someone who would be the typical Ithacan. She had the big hair, with the patch sewed onto her jeans, and just kind of seemed really free spirited. That was pretty much the extent of our adventures in cortona. We wanted to go try and find Bromisole, the house that is featured in Under the Tuscan sun, but it was a far walk from where we were and outside of the walls of cortona. According to rick Steve.. out of the walls to the left of the city. He didn’t give a good description of where to go. We didn’t want to go search for it. We went to the bus stop and waited a good hour and a half for the bus to bring us back to the bus station and while in waiting we played two games of hesitation, let’s just say Ohanto and Uncle Meyer counted as two of my male names. There were a few questionable answers by others but lots of laughs. We sat watching the local Italians drive by and meet in the center in their bright and shiny coats. I want a shiny coat! Though I would never wear it.
Sunday we went to the peaceful Boboli gardens. It was sunny but a little chilly. It was so much fun. We wandered and saw all of the fountains and took lots of pictures. At one point jenn and I thought it would be a good idea to climb up a hill to pick a few of the pretty wild flowers growing in the grass. The hill was a little steeper than anticipated. Jenn fell down crawling backwards. It was the most hilarious thing that happened all day. Good thing linzy got it on camera. Then you see me up on the hill with my butt sticking in the hair trying to waddle my way back down the hill without slipping in the dirt or falling over.
We continued through the gardens some more, the flowers still aren’t blossomed yet but it was still a really nice time and we got lots of pretty pictures. At certain parts of the gardens you can see a really amazing view of the duomo and the rest of Florence. It’s not as good as Piazza del Michelangelo but it’s still pretty astonishing.. it always makes me stop in my tracks.
After the gardens we went into Patti Palace. It was too late to go into some of the exhibits in the palace and for those we will have to go back for but we did get to see the royal apartments. I wish they would have made them more similar to the way they use to be when royalty lived there, but the ceilings and artworks that were hanging were quite something. One of the ceilings really stood out in my mind. The way it was painted was made to look as if fabric was on the ceiling, the way the artist made it look like such a real texture was pretty cool, I’d never seen anything like it before.
So it’s Wednesday at the current moment. This week hasn’t been too exciting. I had a presentation due yesterday on multiple murders. Our group was going to present on John Wayne Gacy and Ted Bundy and give a description of what a serial killer is and the different categories that they fall in. We went on a field trip during class to the Serial Killer museum here in Florence just a few minutes of a walk away. We ran out of time at the museum and weren’t able to present so now we are presenting after spring break. It’s good that we have our PowerPoint done, but annoying that we have to wait so long to present. I feel like our teacher for that class is a little disorganized and doesn’t always have very good of a class structure when she is teaching but overall it’s pretty interesting. The museum was pretty cool. They had wax figures of all the serial killers and some of the ones that were there were Alfred Fish, Ed Gein, Charles Mansion(of course) Ted Bundy, John Gacy, and four others that I don’t remember off the top of my head. We had headphones and it gave a description of each person, what their childhood was like, what they did during their murders.. it was a little disturbing but kind of cool to learn about.
So yeah. That’s pretty much all I’ve been up to these past two weeks. No real big travels yet. Jenn is here till Monday and Jackie is coming this next weekend from Barcelona. We are going to see her in April and spring break is coming up soon so we will be going to London, Dublin, and Paris. I can’t wait for London because I’ll get to see Katie!!!! Then we are meeting up with Rachel, Genevieve, and Linzy in Paris with a date under the Eifel tower for a picnic and the LOUVRE!! I’m excited to go get some real French crepes’ and French bread. It will be nice to go to London and actually understand the language for once. And for Dublin, I don’t really know what we want to do yet or what to expect really. Maybe we will take a day and go outside of Dublin for a change of pace with all the big cities that we will be going to. Other than those trips I am planning to go to lake Como for a week with my friend Randi from downstairs, and the Almafi Coast. We want to go to the beach at Viareggio for my 21st birthday!!! And cinqueterra the very last weekend we are here after everyone else catches their flights. Then for the last week we are here with no class I haven’t really decided if I want to go up to the northern loop and see Prague Berlin and Amsterdam to the van Gogh museum, or make my way down to Greece, which might be a little more expensive but I feel like I wouldn’t feel as rushed just enjoying and getting to know Greece than hopping around from place to place and spending just as much time travel as I am actually in the cities. It’s a decision in process but we’ll see what we end up doing.
