Orientation Continues, Exploration Begins

It seems like every hour I'm getting more and more familiar with the city and my surroundings. We had to be up at campus at 10:30 this morning so my roommates Shelly, Jenny and I decided to try the walk up there. We weren't really sure where we were going but we had a map and about 1.5 hours to get there (we were told the walk was about 40-45 min). It was already pretty hot when we started walking but it was so nice to get familiar with everything and see parts of the city we had never seen before. On the way up we stopped at a cafe to get our first italian espresso. Shelly and I walked in and we ordered two espressos. They were good! I had never had one before and I don't think they serve iced coffee here so we decided it was a good alternate. Everything went well until we got shut down by the guy behind the cash register. Trying to be the confident Italian speaking student that I thought I was, I walked up and said, 'due espresso'. For those of you who don't speak Italian, I was basically saying, 'two espresso'. The man corrected me and then began to lecture me about masculine/feminine singular and plural nouns (I think that's what he was saying...it was in Italian). I guess I have to learn somehow...

When we finally got to campus we sat through 2 hours of Safety information, had lunch and then 2 more hours of academic information. I just dropped out a class so these are the courses I'm officially taking:

Intro to Painting
Intermediate Italian
Early Masters of the Renaissance
History of the Italian Jews

The campus, called Villa La Pietra, is beautiful! I'm in awe. There are five villas, three at the street entrance and two in the back area. To get from the three villas to the two you have to walk down into a valley and then climb up. The students here nicknamed it death valley and I'm pretty sure that's a perfect description, atleast right now when it's 95 degrees out.

Death Valley
The main Villa La Pietra

After orientation a group of us walked down from campus on a mini adventure to find the centro mercale (a huge market selling everything from clothing to fish). On the way we stopped for gelato. This time I tried the sorbetto di melone (melon sorbet). SO good. I'll definitely have to budget the number of gelato stops we make...and eating out. Europe is SO expensive. Tomorrow we're going to go to the grocery store down the street and get food so we can cook! We'll go to the mercale for fresh fruits and vegetables.

Tonight we're going on yet another exploration. We haven't been down to the Arno yet so we're going to go and explore around there and find a place to eat...a cheap place.

I'm working on getting a photo album link so I can post more photos and faster....let you know when that happens....off to the Arno!