I finally have time to actually start blogging! I arrived on Tuesday morning, and brought to my apartment from the airport.  The apartment is nice! It's probably bigger than my apartment at Penn State.  The buildings are really old, but they're so beautiful.  Florence is a really pretty city full of history and art and beautiful buildings.  I love being able to walk around and know that I get to live here for four months!  The first night was tough, it's pretty overwhelming being in a whole different country.  But, the second night was fun and a little easier to handle.  I'm still pretty exhausted from traveling, but hopefully I get on their schedule soon.  

The first day, I moved into our apartment, which is pretty nice.  There is 3 bedrooms, a bathroom, and a kitchen.  We unfortunately don't have a living room with couches, but our kitchen is pretty modern and large compared to everyone else's.  The buildings are so old and different here.  The radiator in our room didn't work the first night, so it was a little cold, but now it's fixed.  The buildings are definitely different here.  We have to open the window after we shower for about 15 minutes, so mold doesn't start to grow.  They have trash bins underground and that's where we have to take the trash.  

Yesterday, we had our first day of orientation.  It was a lot of boring presentations.  After we got dinner at a small restaurant that had great gnocchi. There are so many ridiculously cute small restaurants.  They never seem crowed because I think there are so many options for places to eat.  Also, we are in a very high end location in Firenze.  There are so many expensive stores, including Prada, Gucci, etc.  We are definitely going to have to shop at the cheaper markets.  Yesterday we went to a few different Irish bars with some people in our program.  It was fun, but not a lot of Italians go to those bars. 

Today was our last day or orientation! We got a lot of things accomplished today.  At orientation, we learned about schools trips, and volunteer activities.  I also got my schedule, finally:

monday:

italian 9:30-10:30 AM

identity & culture in italy - 1-2:30 PM

family business in italy - 3-4:30 PM

tuesday:

italian 9:30-10:30 AM

family business in italy 4:30-6PM

wednesday:

italian 9:30-10:30 AM

story of the city 11-12:30

identity & culture- 1-2:30 PM

story of the city - 4:45-6:15 PM

thursday:

italian 9:30- 10:30 AM

For our lunch break, we went to this awesome pizza place across the river called Gustopizza.  It was really great pizza, so I’m sure we will be going back.  Later that day, we got our books and finally our SIM cards! Hopefully the phones work out!!!

Ciao