“No Carb Left Behind” With Pictures!

Yeah, yeah, yeah, it’s been awhile…again… sorry 🙂 I hope you all are not giving up on me yet! The good news is I just returned from Florence today so I have my amazing trip fresh in my head! Well it started off on Friday when we got our train tickets, all by ourselves. I felt like such a big girl 🙂 We got our tickets and then checked out the train station so we had an idea of where we would be going the next day.  We should have known that nothing ever goes routinely in life.  More about that later… Anyways, we decided to check out this restaurant that our teacher from our cooking class owns.  We felt like being adventurous and since we had the metro down already we needed a new challenge, a.k.a. the city bus.  Since we are now “city folk” we managed to dominate the bus system rather easily and made it to the restaurant no problem! Too bad it was closed… So we walked around the area looking for another restaurant because by this time we were pretty much skin and bone.  Another too bad… freakin’ siesta.  Italians believe that there should be about a 3 hour break in the day where everything in the city is closed.  At this time all the restaurants were closed from 4 to 7.  What a crock.  But we eventually got food some 3749027 hours later.  Okay okay now on to our vacation away from vacation.  Our train to Florence was scheduled to leave at 6:12 a.m.  Since the train station is too far away to walk we had to take the metro, we wanted to leave plenty earlier because we really had no idea what we were doing.  We planned on leaving our apartment at 5 to give us plenty of time to get lost.  One problem, we get to the metro and they don’t open the gates until 5:30, and that means the actual metro doesn’t start moving til about 5:45.  We started panicking but had no other choice but to wait and hope we would find our train right away.  We book it to the train station and look up our gate number, 1, sounded easy enough.  Wrong.  The gates we were looking at were numbered 3 to like 30.  Of course 1 and 2 were MIA.  We found a sign we were pretty said gates 1 and 2 with an arrow pointing right so we followed that for a while until the arrows stopped and we were outside the train station, with 5 minutes before our train left.  We power walk back to the front of the station to find someone to help us but none of the help desk are open yet because it’s so dang early.  We find some friendly looking guys and attempt to ask them for help but of course they don’t speak English, or Italian for that matter, pretty sure they were German, anyways.. We eventually get the point across and he points us in the direction of the arrows we had already followed and we said there was nothing down there.  He said no no no go further and run fast! So we started panicking even more and sprinted towards the end of the line, actually left the train station and there it was, train number one, about 2 minutes from pulling away without 3 less than intellegent American girls inside, but by golly we made it.

My first actual train experience went pretty smoothly, minus the ridiculously uncomfortable seats and they annoying accordion playing gypsy that wouldn’t stop begging me for change.  We get to Florence and one of the owners of the bed and breakfast we were staying at picked us up to take us to the b & b.

 Susie and Diann.. if you are ever in Italy look them up and “like” them on Facebook! LTD Bed and Breakfast

We walk through the streets of Florence with some minor small talk and find out she was born and raised in Sioux City, Iowa, small freakin’ world.  We bonded over that for a while and eventually made it to the b & b.  It was the most beautiful thing we had seen in weeks, a soft bed, American coffee pot, American television, wi-fi, Vonage and the most important, peanut butter.  It was heaven.  The first day was pretty chill, they took us around the fun parts of Florence that aren’t so historical and touristy because we had already seen all those things.  We went to the best panini place in Italy, it was even on t.v. 🙂  

We went up to this rooftop cafè above a department store and drank some Chianti wine while overlooking all of Florence.  It was amazing.  After a few bottles were empty we ventured out on the town again.

 View of the Tibre River in Florence from a cliff overlooking the city!

We went to dinner at a restaurant called the Yellow Bar because the B & B owners were friends with the restaurant owners and we had VIP service.  We tried about one of everything on the menu, for free and chased the meal down with a complimentary shot of Limonchello.  It’s for digestion, my health, really.  After about a 3 hour free meal we weren’t quite ready to call it a night so they took us to an Irish Pub a few blocks from the B & B and since they were regulars we again, drank for free 🙂 It was awesome! We talked to so many interesting people and I realized how good I actually was at speaking Italian.  We eventually decided to go home and then woke up to the most amazing thing… American breakfast.  It was complete with scrambled eggs, breakfast potatoes, french toast, American coffee and…peanut butter toast.

 Jackie was obviously excited as well…

I knew that would start a fabulous day and it definitely did!  We showered and got ready to go out again, it was nice taking a hot shower where the water shoots out of the faucet rather than just trickles…we felt so spoiled.  We did some shopping and got some gelato of course and then made our way back to the train station to head back to Rome, much to our disappointment.  Well we had class the next day which was entirely too boring to discuss in my oh so interesting blog.. you,re welcome.  So we’ll skip that day and go on to today…the Papel Audience!  That’s right, I met the Pope, we’re pretty much besties now.  It was amazing!  We live like 4 blocks from the Vatican so we got there plenty early to get a good seat but there were a million people there!  They had about 5 different interpreters that were praying in different languages and when the one that spoke in English came up he was thanking the different groups that had come to Rome to see the Pope.  We thought that was awesome until he says, And a special thank you to the students and faculty attending from Briar Cliff University in Sioux City, Iowa.  Then we all had to stand up and the whole place clapped for us and the Pope like waved! It was the coolest thing ever, I felt so important! Jeesh, that excitement brings me to this very moment, where I am enjoying doing nothing and taking a break from my exciting morning!  We are all resting up before we leave bright and early for Naples and Pompei tomorrow!  We get to see an Italian opera! Can’t wait to tell you all about it!  Arrivederci from Rome! 🙂

No new post 😦 But a pretty sweet shot from Naples!….

2012

01/20

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