We are officially moved into our apartments in Florence Italy! THEY ARE BEAUTIFUL. Our whole class is spread in different apartments throughout the city which is amazing because it actually gives us some separation for the first time in 5 weeks. My apartment is with 3 other girls from our program and we lucked out with being in the building right next to the school that we’re studying through, SACI. There’s only one other apartment in our building that has people from our program in it which is really nice.

Florence is already really cool. Our apartments are so close to the Duomo and to all these amazing museums. When we were in Greece, I would recognize a lot of the sites we were seeing and the statues that were in museums but I didn’t remember a whole lot about them. We’ve only been in Italy a few days and I am already recognizing so much! We got to visit the museum of the Duomo on one of our first days here and as I was walking around, I kept stumbling upon things that I was like “oh hey, I know that piece!” and “I remember learning about the making of this.” It made me feel so good to realize that I’d actually learned a lot in my program at Evergreen.

Seeing Brunelleschi’s Dome, Giotto’s campanile, and St. John’s Baptistry was absolutely breathtaking. I spent so much time in my program at Evergreen learning how they were built and memorizing their names for tests that it felt so worth it finally getting to see them all in person. They were so big and beautiful and the detail that was all over the outsides of the buildings was just a preface to what we would see when we went inside. It was so overwhelming but at the same time made me feel so justified for the all the time and effort that I put into this program back in the states. The artwork in the Duomo museum was absolutely amazing. Seeing the actual Doors of Paradise and realizing how much bigger they were than I thought they were going to be took my breath away. I am not the type of person to just stand in front of a piece of art for longer than five minutes but when I was looking at the artwork in this museum, I couldn’t help but stand there and look at them in awe. The pieces were all so detailed and showed so much emotion. In today’s modern art, I don’t tend to see the kind of emotion that these statues showed. It’s still beautiful but in an entirely different way.

Florence is beautiful. There’s not nearly as much of a language barrier as there was in Greece which makes everything much easier and I feel less out of place here. I loved Greece

but I always felt like people were staring at me because they could tell I didn’t belong. It doesn’t feel like that here. The food is phenomenal. We had some good food in Greece but I was really missing things like pizza and what better place to get pizza than Italy? We have kitchens in our apartments here which is a life saver because I didn’t realize how much I loved to cook until I couldn’t do it at all anymore. It’s so nice being able to cook again and having big dinners with people from class in our own living area; it feels much more like a home. Last thing about food because I’m sitting here with my stomach growling as I write this, but the GELATO OH MY GOSH. I have never tasted something so magical until I tasted the gelato here. We went to this place around the corner from our apartment and they had a kiwi flavor that was made from fresh kiwi. The best kind however, and I will stand by this until I die, was the Ambrosia flavor. It was yogurt, honey, and cinnamon and it was honestly the best thing that has ever been in my mouth. I’ve gotten it almost everyday since we went.