Florence

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I am staying at a hotel just 15mins outside of the city of Florence. The Hotel Concorde. We arrived last night, and my sister and I got on a bus almost immediately to get into the city. We both ate calzones and watched street performers in one of the squares. It was neat, and we then met up with Ramy, Fransico and JP to try to figure out how to get back to the hotel...that took a while.
Today was more interesting, however. We got up as a group and came into the city via our Italian bus driver Antonio. We then had a walking tour of Florence, and saw some amazing churches and statues. However, all of the museums are closed today!! Our tour guide was hilarious though...definitely the best guide we have had so far. He was making fun of everyone, and he kept things moving and didn't go into detail about minute, boring stuff. For instance, we were sitting outside of one of the museums looking at one of the copies of the David statue and he was making fun of the fact that one of the handful of copies is sitting in Las Vegas in one of the casinos! He also made a few cracks about Italian women and how they eat men and their money...I guess you would have had to have been there for that one. 😊 After our tour Sebastien took us to a leather factory and I bought my father a leather wallet and had his initials engraved in it. I think he will like that, I hope.
So since then I have been walking around looking at the leather and silk in the markets, and trying to avoid the pick pockets and gypsies. Saul and Gabriel accompanied me, and since Spanish and Italian are very similar they have been very helpful in communicating with people. It started raining, so I found my way to an internet cafe...I plan on leaving here in a few minutes, however, because at 1630 I am going to go on a bus to the Tuscan countryside and have an authentic Italian meal...I hope it stops raining!

It stopped raining. It is actually pretty hot out. I had been hanging out with Saul and Gabriel all day and we met up with Sebastien and the others at 1630. We loaded up the bus and went out of the city into Tuscany. It was beautiful. We stopped at a church for about 5 minutes to take great pictures of Florence. We then loaded up to go to dinner.
We ended up in a vineyard, and ate dinner at this mans house. He was hilarious. He produces wine that apperently has won plenty of gold medals at all sorts of competitions. Anyway, so he taught everyone how to properly taste wine, and then he served us lasagna for dinner. He added olive oil to it. It was delicious, and I ordered 3 bottles of his virgin olive to send home to my mom. I don't drink wine so after a sip of each, Cindy got most of my drinks (she had trouble gettin back to the bus after dinner). The bus ride home also was entertaining with Sebastien and others singing karyoke over the microphone. I would say a few people had a little too much to drink. 😊

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