Celebrations and Feasts!

So I decided that my latest blog entry was a little bit selfish in that it seemed to talk about me more than Katy, so I though I'd try and make that up a bit with this little entry here. 

Last night Katy and I went out to dinner to celebrate being done with midterms.  We went to this very modern and trendy restaurant that is affiliated with our school and had dinner and dessert.  The food was pretty good and it felt good to get out and celebrate being done with all our exams and not have to think about school for the time being.  Here's some photos of us at the restaurant with their hip, cool menus. 

The following morning, we woke up late and I lounged around in bed while Katy was up doing something in kitchen, I had no idea what.  Little did I know she was making PANCAKES! And before I knew it, this tray pictured below was brought to me in my bed! What a great way to start the day - breakfast in bed! Complete with American pancakes and syrup brought from the states by Mitchel.  

It was deliciously American and I loved every bite of it. 

So thanks Roomie, you're the best! And in case anyone was wondering, I was a good girl, and I did the dishes.  It seemed like the least I could do after all she had done for me! 

We're BACK!

Hey Everybody! Remember me? I used to write here on this blog about all of Katy and I's adventures in Italy.  I apologize for the three week hiatus of blogs, but we lost our internet connection here at our apartment for a couple of weeks and then this past week has been our week of midterms. So between all of that craziness going on, I'm just now getting back on the blogging bandwagon. 

SO, a LOT has been happening in the past few weeks that I have been away from the keyboard, but to save you the extensive reading I'll just try and briefly sum up the last few weeks here (we'll see how "brief" I can really be... especially when I'm currently stuck in the apartment due to a massive thunder and lightning storm that just moved in about 20 minutes ago)

Anyways, Katy went on her first weekend trip without me. She went to Prague with a group called Florence for Fun. She left late one Thursday and didn't return until well after midnight on Sunday night. From what she told me she was glad to have gone and said the highlight of her weekend was definitely going to see the ballet Swan Lake. I myself stayed in Florence that weekend and wasn't up to too much.  I had told myself already that I was going to hang around because Mitchel was coming the following weekend and I thought that I should done some housekeeping type things that I knew I would neither have the time or desire to do while he was visiting.  So, I think all I can really recall doing that weekend was a lot of laundry that had seemed to pile up on me from the weeks before.  In case you're unaware, doing laundry here is quite an undertaking. It wouldn't be so bad if there were dryers in Florence, or if your apartment at least had a place to hang a line... BUT, it's okay. I'm just really looking forward to coming home to a good washer and dryer and I will probably never take them for granted the rest of my life.  I did take a short day trip that weekend with some friends to Assisi.  It was beautiful! ... once we finally caught the correct train and make it to the correct city... good times, but I figure getting on the wrong train has to happen at least once in any foreign traveling experience, and I can assure you that it was not my first train mishap.  Either way, it was great to get out of Florence for the day and see the beautiful hills and churches of the town.

The following week went by quickly enough, thankfully as I was only EVER SO EAGER for my fiance to arrive.  Come Thursday Katy was off to Garmish for the weekend to visit some friends of hers and I was left here to count down the hours until 11:55 the following day. 

Friday finally came and it was a beautiful day, which I was so happy for as it had been raining a lot throughout the week and I was really hoping for nice weather for Mitchel's visit.

Well, my prayers sure were answered. The whole week he was here was AMAZING. The weather and the time we got to spend together was wonderful and unforgettable. We made it to Pisa, Venice, and Rome all in the eight days that he was here.  Pisa and Venice happened in the first weekend he was here, and then we stuck around Florence for the week while I had classes and then after I was done for the week on Thursday, we took off to Rome for his last weekend here. Every trip was so special in it's own way. I could not have asked for a better week with my fiancee.  I would not have changed anything about how the week went, especially not our decision to eat gelato at least once a day for every single one of the eight days that he was here. Such a delicious decision, if you ask me! 

I was of course, very sad to see him have to go on Sunday morning, but I knew all along that he could not be here forever, so I just tried to keep my chin up and a smile on my face for the next few days, which brings us now to the present. 

Currently, Katy and I just finished our week of midterms, and we survived, thankfully.  They weren't all that bad, just very different than any midterms we had ever had to take before. 

So, now we're looking ahead into our week of spring break here and the future seems exciting.  We just bought tickets earlier today to go to England for a few days and then later on in the week I'll be off to Sicily for the latter part of the break.  So needless to say there are many adventures ahead of us both and hopefully too now some great blog entries for you all to read.  Now that I have internet back, I'll be sure to do my best to keep everyone up to date on all the latest happenings in Italy again.  Thanks for being patient and waiting for me to get back into the blogging world.  I'm looking forward to having more stories and adventures to write about and share with you. 

Until then, Ciao! 

I know two photos doesn't really seem like a lot of photos from the three weeks that I haven't been able to blog, but it was the best my computer could do for uploading in the time that I had.  

The first one is me in Assisi.  The weather was amazing, in case you hadn't noticed, I'm not wearing a jacket, which is a huge deal for me... so it truly was warm out that day!

This photo, I LOVE. It's Mitchel and I at the Colosseum!  What a wonderful trip! Thanks for coming Mitchel, I love you!

When in Rome...

Alright dear readers... grab a cup of hot coffee or tea and a blanket and get cozy, because I think this post might be a long one.  You see, Katy and I just got back from a three day weekend in ROME!

This was our first successful overnight trip!  It was an academic field trip organized by our school, so we were both excited to be going on a trip where the transportation and lodging were already planned out, especially after our little Cinque Terre fiasco a few weekends prior.  

So, our weekend began early Friday morning meeting at the train station at 8:15 AM.  Katy and I quickly learned that we were rather a minority as we were only 2 of the 30 from our group that were from Apicius.  The rest of the student were from FUA, Florence University of the Arts (another school here in Florence that we partner with trips and other activites)

The Eurostar train got us to Rome in less than two hours and so by 11 AM we were all off the train and playing follow the leader to our hotel a few blocks away.  It was here that I finally felt some sympathy for those long strings of tourists that take up all of the sidewalk with their rolling suitcases and who I usually get frustrated with attempting to pass as I'm trying to get to class... because now, that was us.  Thankfully I had just brought my backpack so I didn't have any problems, but Katy looked like she was having a bit of trouble with her rolling duffle whenever we crossed over the cobblestones of the street.  I believe she ended up just carrying her bag over her shoulder.  

Soon we made it to our hotel and were allowed about an hour to go use the restroom, find some lunch, or whatever else we needed to do before we headed out on our first guided tour of Rome.  Katy and I quickly scanned the streets for a place where I could find a sandwich or something to eat.  Here's a photo of me with the sandwich I found.  As you can see, it was HUGE and cost me just over 8 euro... ridiculous, I know.. but if it helps any, it was pretty tasty. 

So with full bellies and empty bladders we all headed out on our tour.  We started by going to a nearby church, whose name roughly translated into english as St. Peter in Chains where we saw the tomb of Pope Julius the second and the chains that Peter wore while in Rome.  It was now at this point that I officially felt like a tourist, with a large group of people wandering around  with my head and eyeballs scanning everything greedily and taking photo after photo in hopes of getting at least one or two good ones for every 10 or so that I took.  As I've mentioned before, I'm not the most skilled photographer.

After here, we moved on to the Colosseum! It was amazingly beautiful and huge. We all purchased tickets and were able to go inside and have a rushed 15 minutes to see everything we could and take as many photos as possible.  Here's just a quick photo of the main structure.  Pretty similar to any sort of postcard you might find from Rome, but still cool to think I was the one standing behind the camera to take the picture. 

And here's another photo of Katy and I standing on the same stones that were laid so long ago by the Romans when they were building this road, called Victory Lane... and yes mom, in case you were wondering, those are the pants that you dislike so much because they're too long and I destroy the backs of them. :) Love you mom!

Our purchased tickets got us into both the Colosseum and the Forum, which I guess was essentially the original and central hub of ancient Rome where all the activity got it's start and everyday life happened.  It was very cool and amazing to walk through and think about the lives and lifestyles that had passed on that same ground so many years ago. 

After this we took one more quick tour of a few more important monuments around that area, one of which included multiple security guards who would blow their whistles at you if you sat on the steps of the monument.

After some more photos, well many more photos really, we headed across town to see the pantheon.  The pantheon was rather hard to photograph so I don't have any pictures of it, but it was still neat to see.  Basically it was just this gigantic, perfectly round building with a 9 meter hole in the ceiling, so that was the only light in the whole building and pigeons would fly in and out too every now and then.  Very cool.

We were given free time after this last stop and were also told of a great gelato shop just down the street, so Katy and I headed over there for a much appreciate sugary sweet treat.  My mixed berry and chocolate orange were delicious and it seemed like Katy was a fan of her tiramisu, coffee, and mandarine flavors.  Now all that was left to do was to pull out our map of Rome and get to navigating our way back to the hotel...all by ourselves.  Thankfully Katy has proven herself to be very handy with a map and got us back just fine.

The rest of the evening was pretty relaxed back at the hotel room.  The room was tricky at first because neither the lights or any electricity seemed to be working, and we were starting to worry that our power was out and that we'd have to go all the way back down the four flights of stairs (yes, we were on the 4th floor of the hotel room too... it must just be a theme for us here in Italy) because it was too dark to even find the phone to call down to the front desk.  However, Katy came to the rescue by remembeing something she had just learned in her most recent hospitality class about how some hotels in Europe have a little "power" slot by the door that you have to put your key card into to get power in your room.  We found the slot and -  Viola! We had power!  Hooray!  So, then after we got the lights and power going we did like I think most people do when they first get into their room, and plopped onto our beds and turned on the TV.  We were happy to  finf one channel in english with Italian subtitles so we spent the next hour or so lying around reading, watching TV and taking nice HOT showers before heading out to dinner.

Dinner was later, around 8:30 and Katy and I both had to laugh at the fixed menu they had for us.  The brochure from the school about Rome that we had gotten had informed us that we would be sampling "traditional Roman cuisine"... what a lie. It was hotel food, from their restaurant and consisted of the following: 

Dinner #1 hard and hollow dinner roll, bow tie pasta with red sauce, pork (we think) with cheese sauce and gravy, some steamed carrots, and potatoes, with some ice cream cake for dessert.  

Dinner #2: More dinner rolls ( yummy...) rigatoni pasta with red sauce, turkey with gravy, cooked spinach and potato wedges.  I don't think you have to be a culinary genius to realize that this really wasn't any "traditional Roman cuisine" So Katy and I both got a laugh out of this.  Dinner ended later, around 9:30 or 10:00 and so Katy and I, being the cool and exciting people that we are proceeded to go straight upstairs to our room and collapse into our beds! 

So... hope you are all still with me here.  If you need to go get a refill on your drink or anything, now might be a good time.  I'm about to start with day two

Day Two: began EARLY.  Continental breakfast downstairs in the restaurant of the hotel.  Pretty decent, but nothing really to write home about, so I'll just keep on writing.

We were instructed to meet at 8AM "sharp" in the lobby as we had a full morning of tours schedules.  So, of course, most people slowly rolled in a BIT after 8 as that was probably just a little early for them after whatever their activities of last evening had been...

Our first activity of the day was a tour of the Vatican Museums!  We had a tour guide and even got to use the ear audio pieces to hear everything that she had to say about the museums.  One funny thing though that I do have to note here was actually being one of those big tour groups that has to follow their guide carrying some embarrassing baton with colored ribbons or an umbrella or something of the sort.  We, in fact, were instructed to follow our guides bright blue umbrella, which Katy and I tried numerous times to name, but never found quite the right name. 

So, the Vatican museums.. in a word: AMAZING. I don't think I can even describe it. And I wont even bother putting up photos of it because they just don't do it justice.  We spent a couple good hours in there, walking through it all, listening to her speak about everything and just trying to take it all in.  It was pretty overwhelming, for sure. 

We finally made it out and took a short lunch break before heading off the see St. Peter's Basilica.  Katy and I went to this pizza place with lots of crazy topping options, so we both tried a couple different ones and shared to get a good variety.  I think we ended up with one with mushrooms and cheese, one with potatoes ( which I thought were actually pineapples and had I known were potatoes, I probably would not have ordered ) one with sausage and broccoli ( yes, Mitchel, broccoli on pizza) and then one with tuna and artichokes.  It was interesting to say the least, but really pretty tasty. 

Once we were done with lunch we walked over to the Basilica and heard some information about it before being let loose with free time for the rest of the day.  Katy and I decided to go down and see the tombs of the popes before leaving the Vatican City and then we headed out with intentions of wandering the city and hopefully finding some earrings for Katy. We got lucky and Katy found two pairs of earrings, both of which were very cute and had my approval.  Here's some photos of some of the happenings of that afternoon.  

Katy tried on some great masks in this one shop, I think red is a good color for her, don't you? 

And I found Nutella heaven at this one particular crepe and gelato shoppe. YUM!

And a few other highlights of that afternoon might include:

1. Finding a random square in the middle of the city that had ancient ruins and also seemed to double as a cat sanctuary, as we must have counted at least half a dozen stray cats inside the fenced in square.

2.  Seeing a group of boys playing a game of soccer with clothing and street lamps used for goals. 

3.  Walking into a market down a random alley complete with a band including the cello, the saxophone, the guitar and the accordion.   

4.  Running into an extremely crowded street where a political rally was being held... at least that was our best guess as to what was going on.  It was far too packed for us to venture far enough in to really find out what was going on.   

And, well, that's all I can remember for now. 

So, after a full 10 hour day of being out Katy and I returned to our hotel tired and slightly sunburnt for another late dinner and bedtime.  Hooray again for hot showers and beds that don't break!

Day Three/Sunday:

Started early again at 9 AM with the same continental breakfast and checkout of our rooms.  We had the option of going to a huge flea market or going to Mass at the Basicilia and seeing the Pope.  Katy and I chose to go to Mass and I think we both thought it was a good choice.  The Basilica was amazing and even though we could not understand that Mass, as it was in Latin, it was still really cool.  The Pope even gave a quick little 10 minute message from his bedroom window which I tried to take a picture of by zooming in a lot with my camera.  It didn't turn out too well, but it's still the Pope, so I thought I'd put it up anyways.  In case you are wondering, yes the tiny little white dot inside the window is, in fact, the Pope.   

 

The square was PACKED after the Pope's message and so me, being the newly discovered claustrophobic individual, was more than ready to get out of there as soon as possible.  So we headed over to a sandwich shop a few streets away and got some lunch before catching a very crowded number 40 bus back to the other side of town to meet up with the rest of our group for the rest of our guided activities for the day.  The remainder of our day was rather rushed as we only had a couple of hours left to get in the rest of our scheduled stops before we had to be back at the station for our train back to Florence at 5:00.

One thing we saw on Sunday was the Trevi Fountain, and here's a photo of part of the fountain.  It was beautiful, but very, very busy!

We took some photos at the fountain and threw in some coins, which were suppose to symbolize that you would someday come back to Rome, and then we quickly moved on to the famous Spanish steps, which are near where the Spanish Embassy is.  After here we headed off to see the house of the President.  It was great timing when we got there because they were right in the middle of their changing of the guards ceremony and so there was a full band playing and a procession of men in uniform marching all around the building.  It was really cool to see.  

After we left here we headed back to our hotel to grab our bags and get to the station to catch out train back!

It was an amazingly busy and full weekend that was both very exhausting and exciting.  We were very thankful for the awesome weather.  It was gorgeous all weekend long with beautiful blue skies an sun!  I really liked Rome, and regardless of wether or not I'd thrown that coin into the fountain, I know I'll definitely be going back!  

I think that Katy and I were both happy to have gone, but we also happy to be back at our place that evening to be able to rest form the weekend and check our e-mails!

  

Company for Supper

So last Thursday night Katy and I invited a classmate and friend of ours over for supper.  The deal was that we would buy the ingredients and he would cook the meal for us.  I knew Miles from my first semester back at UAA and I knew he was quite the chef , so we figured it would be a good deal for everybody.  Especially since Miles had been running low on money due to... shall we say, problems with his ATM card.  Aparently lately he'd been hoping around from apartment to apartment cooking dinners for friends in attempts of feeding himself as well.  So we thought it would be a nice gesture too on our part to be able to help feed the kid.  

Miles showed up around 6PM after he got out of his last class with a pocketfull of pasta dough that he had brought back from his most recent class.  Now we knew that pasta was going to be on the menu somehow.  After some more discussing, we decided to do something with the chicken that Katy and I still had in our fridge, so we made up a list of everything else we needed and made a quick trip to the little grocery store down the street.  Once we got back we got to work in the kitchen.  Miles got to work on the vegetables and chicken and I sat down to start stuffing the ravioli with some pesto mixed with breadcrumbs.  We had to roll out the pasta dough with a red aluminum thermos we found in our cupboard on an old wooden TV tray... in case you were wondering.  Here's some photos of our work in progress.  

Katy seemed to be the designated dishwasher and did a great job keeping up with all the dishes that Miles made, which was great because we only have so many dishes and so much space in our little kitchen here.  

Our roommate Kimberly conveniently showed up right before the food was ready and since we had more than enough for ourselves we invited her to join us.  She put some crostini's in the oven and minutes later we were all sat down to our meal.  Thankfully, our little table surprised us by swiveling out and opening up to double the size it normally is, which allowed us, and all our food to fit, quite... shall I say, cozily?  

Here's some more pictures of part of the spread we had for supper, minus the tomato sauce for the chicken and the pasta dish that I had been working on earlier  ( it's kind of hard to photograph pasta and sauce and make it look nice ) Here's also a photo of most of us around our little table.

All in all I think Katy and I both agreed that it was a nice evening and a good way to end a week of classes, so we'll probably try and do it again soon.   

 

This is the day...this is the day...oh boy was this A day!

Katy and I still aren't quite sure what the moral of the story is here...maybe it's "don't travel on Friday the 13th", maybe it's "be really careful how you plan out your trips"... we don't really know yet, and we may never know.  What we do know is that somehow, our two-day weekend trip to Cinque Terre turned into a comical and exhausting almost 12 hour day journey.  Let me start at the beginning, for those of you whose curiosity I've captured. 

The day began not all that early with a train scheduled out of Florence at 10:30 in the morning. So we woke up relatively early that day, packed our backpacks and headed out to the station by about 10AM.  We stopped at this little old man's shop that we have had to see and smell every morning on the way to school.  So, finally that morning,  I told Katy, I'm stopping.  I'm so glad we did, because I got one of the best, fresh, warm doughnuts I've had in a long time.  She got some other deep fried rice fritter thing, and we both decided we didn't even want to share our goodies with each other, as we were both such large fans of our own purchases.  Needless to say, it's probably not a good thing that I have to pass this stand every morning on the way to school and walk by 80 cents of deliciousness everyday.  But I suppose it will teach me restraint.  ( I WILL fit in my wedding dress when I come back, I WILL! )  Maybe I'll just have to find another route to school, we'll see...

Anyways, from there on, we hopped on our train and a little over an hour later ended up in sunny and beautiful Monterosso, the first town of our intended tour of Cinque Terre.  

SIDE NOTE: for those of you who might not know about Cinque Terre, it's basically 5 (Cinque) little towns (terre) along the coast of the Mediterrean Sea, which are all connected by hiking trails so that you can hike for a couple of hours and get  from one to the next, to the next, to the next, ...well, theoretically, you could do that.  In case you can't tell from my buildup of our story, that's not quite how it went for us... BUT back to Monterosso.  It was a beautiful, blue sky and sunny day when we left Florence and it only got more gorgeous as we headed towards our destination.  Here's a photo of Katy and I on the beach right outside the train station of Monterosso.   I had to set the camera up on a half brick wall to get this shot, so it's really far away.  I apologize for my poor photography skills, but I suppose I can't be a great blogger AND photographer, right? :) 

Anyways, this is where we were going to begin our journey, however, upon consulting the woman at the train station, we discovered that because it's still technically the winter season here in Italy and Cinque Terre is really a very touristy town, most places around the area were closed for the season.  And to top it off, all the hiking trails connecting the five towns were completely inaccessible at the time... great!  The lady kindly told us that the only way we would be able to get to the next town was by train.  So we bought a ticket and got on the next train to Vernazza, the nearest town, which happened to only be about 3 minutes away by train.  Go figure.  

Vernazza is where Katy had booked out hostel for the night, so we thought that now that we were in the right town, we should try and find it.  About an hour later, after walking all over the very tiny and very asleep town, we finally found ourselves following an Italian speaking man up yet another  set of stairs that we had perviously taken three times already, only to be led to the door of the woman that we had been looking for all along.  Let's keep in mind that by this time, it's still only about 2 or 3 in the afternoon.  The lady shows us our room, which was stuffed with four beds as it's supposed to hold four people, all four of which we had to pay for in the price of our room, even though there were only two of us. 

The lady gave us our key and left the room.   Katy sat on one of the beds and I sat on the one chair, and at that point we literally felt like we should just start to twiddle our thumbs, because there was nothing we could do. And we were going to be stuck here for the next, well, about 8 hours until we could even go to bed, just to wake up the next morning and not even be able to hike on to the next town on our journey, as all the trails were closed.  It was at that point, after about 20 minutes of siting in our room that we decided to take the orange peel from the orange that I had just peeled out of the trash can, grab out bags and go back to the lady and beg, or rather, argue for some, ANY, money back.  Katy did her best to reason with the lady, using her spanish, and all I caught was something about emergency and we have to go home ( this was my idea, by the way, to just tell her that something had come up back in Florence and we had to go back and could not stay so could we get any money back ) I don't know if the lady really didn't understand or if she just wanted to argue for the sake of arguing... we'll probably never know.  When it was all said and done, she finally decided to give us half of our money back, which was better than nothing.

So, after we had run down the stairs to get away from her, we headed back off to the train station to get some tickets to the last town we were intending on seeing this weekend.  We figured that at least we could take the train to it to see it, even if we couldn't hike to it, and then just catch the latest train out of that town back to Florence.  That's what we "figured"...

So, the next train was scheduled to leave the town at 5:30, it was at that time about 4.  Not a huge problem, we'd just go back down by the water, hang out and read until then.  Which we did, no problem.  The problem came when we went back up at 5:30 and confused our train with the other one on the wrong track, and consequently missed our train by about a minute.  We watched the correct train leave, just standing there on the track... not knowing what we were doing.  Frustrating, to say the least.  To keep everybody fully updated at this time, it was now late, dark, and cold, and we were hungry.  But, nothing, nothing, was open in the little tiny town we were stuck in.  Well, I suppose that's not all entirely true.  Turns out we just had to wait another hour for the next train so we ran back down to the town and found a little ceramics shop that randomly  happened to sell decks of cards too, so we bought some cards and played Go-Fish and Gin back up in the station until our NEXT train was supposed to leave.  

Here's a photo of us playing cards in the station... again, another timer photo.  Not the greatest, but we were just trying to capture our desperation of the situation. The lower photo is of Vernazza, where we were stuck for 4 hours.  Beautiful, I know, but not the greatest place to be stuck with nothing to do. 

Thankfully, we made the next train out of Vernazza onto Corniglia.  It took not even another five minutes to get there, but when we did we found out that the next and last train out of there going onto Florence was leaving in less than an hour and the actual town itself was a 15 minute walk, at least, from where we were currently at the station.  So, we settled with the fact that our hungry and rumbling tummies would not be getting any food until we got all the way back to Florence.  We passed the next hour in the small station of Corniglia singing songs, dancing about, and just acting goofy in general, mainly our of our hunger, exhaustion, and my desperate attempts to get warm.   I took a video on my camera of some of our antics in that hour, but I don't think I'll load that up, just to conserve some of the respect you might still have for us. 

 The warm train to Florence was a welcome thing and we were both so happy to finally be able to just sit down and know that for almost the first time that day, it seemed like, we were headed in the right direction. 

We finally made it back to Florence at about 10PM that night, very tired and very hungry.  We were determined to at least make it out to dinner though, so after dropping our bags back at our place we headed out to a little restaurant across the street and sat down to a warm and delicious dinner of gnocci, chicken, and stewed beef.  Warm food was a welcome feeling to our empty bellies.  I told Katy that were going all out that night, after a day like this, so we ended the evening with desserts, and chatted at our table until late in the night before returning to our room at almost 12:30. To sum it all up: what a day!  It was full of laughs and adventures.  A very memorable experience to say the least! 

Cheesecake and chocolate spice cake...always a good way to end the day! 

English movies in Italy

This won't be a very long or in depth posting here, but Katy and I still thought that this little outing of ours was blog-worthy - so, up it goes!

 It all began earlier last week, when one of our roommates, Kimberly, invited Katy and I to go see a movie in a local theater here that plays films in English a couple of times every week.  So, last Thursday after we had finished classes for the week, we joined Kimberly at the Odeon Theatre, which happened to only be about 5 minutes away from our apartment.  As you can see from the pictures posted here, the theater itself was the main reason we wanted to post this event.  Look at how beautiful it is! It's like an old fashioned theater, with amazing cloth seats, a balcony, and beautiful columns and tapestry all over.   We sat up in the balcony for the showing of Frost/Nixon, which was kind of like a dramatic interpretation of the Frost and Nixon interviews in light of the whole issue of Watergate and Nixon' pardon by Ford.  It was surprisingly well done and enjoyable to watch.  We were all impressed with how it touched us and made us think about the whole situation. 

Another very cool part to me was that there was an intermission half way through the show so that you could back out to the lobby and buy snacks, popcorn, drinks, whatever you wanted, and then they would flash the lights when the show was about to start again.  I got some of the saltiest popcorn I have ever eaten, and Katy got an iced tea, but there was lots of concession options to choose from.  (And of course by drinks, I do mean alcoholic drinks because this is Europe, folks!)  All in all, it was a fun night, and to be able to get out and see a film in english was great!  As we left the theater, we had to remind ourselves that weren't back home, but really still in Italy. Katy and I bought a Club pack of tickets for the theater, so I think we'll probably be going back a few more times throughout our stay here.    

Turning Twenty in Italy!

So, yesterday was my birthday... or should I just say Monday, February 9th was... This has been rather confusing for me... since I think my birthday actually spanned the length of about two days as I'm currently living in a country where I'm about 1o hours ahead of my birth-state.  Anyways, the point of this first terribly incorrect run on sentence ( sorry Mrs. Forstner, I know you taught me better than that...) is that I just celebrated my 20th birthday here in Italy. 

One of the best gifts was the weather! We've been having rain, rain, rain, and more rain here for over a week now, but yesterday just so happened to be GORGEOUS with blue skies and sun! So, that in itself was a wonderful gift to me.  I spent the bulk of my day wandering the streets of Florence since I didn't have any classes until 6 in the evening.  I walked all over, until I got lost half-way across the city and decided I'd better start to find my way back to the apartment so that I could change into my chef clothes in enough time to make it all the way back across town again for the class.  It's fun to meander around here, because everything is always so alive and full of life.  Even on just a random Monday at 2:00 in the afternoon, the streets are full.  There's so much to watch and see and observe.  But I have to remember to be careful just how much people observing I do compared to how much street name observing I do.  I figured the best way to find my way around is to just get lost and then find my way back out again. 

So, that was my day, rather quiet and dare I say...lonely?  Thankfully though, it got better!

Then my class at 6.  The chocolate class.  We met at the instructors shoppe here in town and got to work right away tempering chocolate and filling lots and lots of molds of all shapes and sizes of delicious dark chocolate.  It was a very fun and messy process.  I'm thinking I might need to dedicate a jacket just to this class, and then maybe when it's all over I'll just dye the whole thing black.  Class passed by quickly and before I knew it, I was meeting up with Katy and two friends of ours, Tricia and Colleen, for a late dinner at a restaurant that Katy had found after spending the afternoon diligently searching for somewhere for us to eat.  Let me just start by saying that she did an AWESOME job.  We were at this little place called Trattoria Anita, and it was cute, cozy, and delicious! The service was wonderful and the food was even better, and all at a totally reasonable price.  We all had amazing pastas for starters and then an entree of chicken or some other meat.  It was a little after 10:00 when our waiter finally asked us if we wanted any dessert, and so of course, in Emily fashion I said YES! Between the four of us we split a tiramisu and a chocolate torte.  Little did I know though, that when I had first excused myself to use the restroom at the beginning of the meal that my friends had confronted our waiter to tell him that it was my birthday and could they do something special.  So, as the dessert came out, (my tiramisu had a little red candle in it) all the the lights in the restaurant went out and the whole place erupted into singing Happy Birthday!  It was so sweet and thoughtful of them! What a great way to end my special day here in Italy.  

My delicious chicken with asparagus, with a slice of potato and a tomato! YUM!

My Happy Birthday Tiramisu! Even bigger YUM!

Posing in front of a statue on the way home, we found sweet couple to take out photo.  Katy and I are in the center with Tricia on the left and Colleen on the right. 

I do have to add though, as just a little P.S note here for all of you back home, that I am SO sorry about my stupid cell phone.  I think that in the couple of hours that we were in the restaurant MANY of you called with your birthday wishes for me, and that was SO sweet of you, THANK YOU so much.  I felt terrible when I found this out and discovered that there was absolutely no service whatsoever in that building and I sincerely apologize that no one could get a hold of me.  I would have loved to talk to each and every one of you that called.  But thank you for being persistent and e-mailing me as well. I woke up this morning to over a dozen loving e-mails, and I cried my way through each and every one of them.  It got a little tricky to read them through my tears of joy to hear from you, but I wouldn't have had it any other way. Your love and support mean the world to me here, and I'm so thankful! Thank you Alaska and thank you Italy for giving me a wonderful 20th birthday!