Our first week in Italy

At Montecchio vineyard in Chianti, Italy, 28 May 2010.

It's amazing-- I can't believe we've been here for a whole week already! The last few days have been a sort of icky haze, as Lindi and then I were both sick, but it all works out. We're both feeling (mostly) better, so we can get back to being excited.

Our 28-hour trip here was followed by a lovely few days in Stresa, which is in the north of Italy in the Lake District, near the Swiss border. We toured the islands on Lago Maggiore, took a cable car up the nearest mountain, and spent lots of time walking along the water and eating gelato (at least once a day, and sometimes twice...) It was good to have some time in the country to recover from jet lag.

We left Stresa on Wednesday and took a train to Milan, then another to Florence. We shared our train compartment with a girl named Rossella, a law student in Rome, which was actually pretty lucky-- our train stopped for about twenty minutes in a tunnel, and then pulled out into the next station to wait for another half an hour, and without Rosella we would never have known that the reason for the delay was that our train had hit some sort of large animal (most likely a cow, or perhaps a deer). Lovely. Anyway, we made it to Florence unscathed (except for the deer/cow incident), and made the trek from the train station to our apartment.

The apartment is beautiful-- we live on the sixth and seventh floors of a building overlooking the Ponte Vecchio, one of the bridges across the River Arno. When we have the windows open (which we often do to get a breeze, since electricity is ridiculously expensive in the center of the city) the sounds of the city fill our apartment. This is mostly acceptable (the babble of the voices of pedestrians below, street musicians and the woosh of traffic) but occasionally really annoying (as in the ambulances and police cars which often wail past our windows-- HOW can there be THIS many emergencies RIGHT BY OUR APARTMENT in the MIDDLE of the NIGHT?!-- and the loud laughter of drunk people on the rooftop bar across the street). All in all, though, it's a rather gorgeous place with hardwood floors and antique furniture. Right now, Emily and I are sitting on the couch in the living room, and Lindi is sitting on a chair by the window overlooking the river, sketching and likely enjoying the smell of the popular waffles with nutella that are sold at several creperies on the street. Basically, they smell like cake.

We went on a tour of Chianti on Thursday, which was mostly very beautiful, but ended somewhat disastrously when Lindi got sick during the ride home. I followed soon after, and both of us spent the majority of the last several days in bed. I did drag myself out of the apartment to go to orientation with Emily on Friday morning, where they told us important things such as how to replace our passport if it is lost and that it is illegal to buy counterfeit purses and watches on the street.

Finally, today, we both got up (feeling at least mostly human again) and went for a walk through the city. We went to a small grocery store, gazed up at the Duomo, visited a free exhibition of paper art, and walked through the market, where we bought a few scarves and magnets and Lindi got a new sundress. I'm still not feeling spectacular, but it was really nice to be out of bed and walking around in the sun.

Emily and I start classes in the morning. I'm taking intensive Italian (four hours a day, five days a week!) and Emily is taking Fashion Illustration and Printmaking. It should be interesting. :)

I'm going to go take a shower and head to bed now, but hopefully one of us will write every day or two!

<3,
Helen