Saturday, February 8, 2014

A bike ride through Florence

So Thursday we had class again. I guess that's why they call it a study abroad, but honestly we know why people like me study abroad - to travel, to cultivate myself and to blog. Well anyway in class again we talked about Marco and everything sick that he did. Then we watched a Chinese documentary on "woodblock printing" but I thought it was really funny because the narrator was a Chinese woman who struggled to pronounce English and just skipped w's and b's all together so it became "oodlock" printing. Also the movie had subtitles because the narrator was hard to understand and sometimes the subtitles would be wrong. All together, I enjoyed the documentary. Then we had our lunch break. I stopped at this butcher's shop and the guy cut me off some prosciutto and put it on a sandwich. Ah, mio cuore! It was really good. Then I headed back for round 2 of these classes. There we discussed Italy's history and it's affects on the mentality of food. A lot of that focused on the lack of food during world war 2 and now that food is plentiful people don't value it as much and don't put as much effort into it. Well after class, I was like it's too great if a day to just chill so I sat out at piazza Santa Croce and typed some blog stuff. While I was sitting in the sun blogging away on my phone an African man comes up to try to sell me some African bracelet that I don't want. They always say it's free but then they follow you around asking for money until you give then some. I ended up getting the bracelet for free so I was pumped. Then I met up with my roommate Paul, his girlfriend Gina and her roommate Darcy and we rented bikes for an hour. Well it was supposed to be an hour but we enjoyed it so much we kept them an extra hour (which cost us another four euro). It was so much fun: 
And of course the famous David pose. 
We ride our bikes across the river and then up to Piazza Michelangelo. The views were amazing as was the weather there was even a guy there singing and playing a guitar. It was amazing:
I wore my Mount shirt and unbelievably a Mount alumni was there and recognized the shirt, and that was really cool. We got our picture taken with him and he was really cool. He said he recognized us by the beers we were carrying not by the shirt I was wearing: 
It was really just a beautiful day and a really good view. 
 
After returning the bikes it was time to get ready for the potluck. Paul and I were supposed to bring the wine and we did bring it. We got a marvelous pre-dinner wine, three bottles of red chianti to go with dinner, and one bottle if grappa as an after dinner. We showed up fashionably late and had a really good time. There was fresh bread, asparagus, salad, chicken, and pasta. It was really good. Somehow we managed to finish all the wine. There were 15 of us.  Also we had a Florentine carnival cake to end the night: 
Afterwards we went out for a quick round (the drink were really colorful cocktails in shot glasses and really cheap) and then it was off to bed because we had a big day that started early in Chianti the next day: 
It was just another great day in Florence. 

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