Living The Dream

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I'm in FLORENCE! I've been here less than a day and I'm already in love with the country, the city, the villa, and the people.

I'm on a house-computer so I won't quite be able to upload pictures of everything, but I'll right down as many things as possible. OK, lets start from the beginning.

I flight left LAX at 6:30 pacific time, it was on a 777, so every seat had an individual television, which definitely helped pass the time. Over the course of the flight to Paris I watched four movies, two friends episodes, and one French documentary about polar bears. The Paris airport was enormous so we walked about half an hour to get to our connecting flight to Florence, and then waited for 40 minutes. Embarrassing moment #1: When I'm bored in a public place, I like to eavesdrop on strangers' conversations, as I'm sure many of you like doing, so I was doing this in the Paris airport. It took me a good thirty seconds to figure out I couldn't understand anyone because (wow) they were speaking French! I'll chalk that embarrassing moment up to being extremely tired. I also heard Spanish being spoken with a French accent for the first time, and it almost made me want to cut my ears off.

We got on a much smaller plane for a much shorter flight to Florence. Thank the Lord that I had a window seat, because I had an almost-religious experience as we were flying over the Italian Alps while the sun was starting to set. The biggest mountains with the most snow I have ever seen, from thousands of feet in the air. Wonderul. The thick fog below us cleared just in time for me to catch a view of the Meditteranean.

We landed in Florence and were greeted at the terminal by thirty of my screaming house-mates that had either gotten there earlier or stayed in Europe for the break. With them were Stewart and D'esta Love, the old married couple that are our visiting faculty, they live in their own wing of the villa and teach courses here. They are the grandparents of the house. Also with them was Elizabeth Watley, the amazing program director, and who I have heard many a legend about, including the fact that she might be a mafia princess. We took a 20 minute bus ride to our villa, and immediately were presented with an Italian dinner. The villa's chef has to have been given the power of a food god, because her meals are incredible, especially, but not surprisingly, the pasta. After dinner, the whole house went ice skating at this place four or five blocks from the house. I fell three times on my first go around the ring, but I got the hang of it, more or less. After skating, seven of us went to a German bar near the ring, and we talked and hung out with some locals, and I spoke Italian to Italians!

It was a wonder that I was still standing, seeing that I hadn't slept for 24 hours.

Oh WOW I haven't talked about the villa yet. It is a contender for my favorite building on the planet. It is SO beautiful. My room, which I share with one other, is tiny. The bathroom we have, is a 4x5 closet with sink, mirror, toilet, bidet, and shower, all in the same place. I'll put pictures of all this up later. Part of the house is modern, and comfortable, and the other part, the part with the classrooms, is like Hogwarts. Old architecture, old windows, old floors, old doors, and an old smell. It is so beautiful, all of it. Every gruop of students that has lived here has left a tribute to their time here, resulting in random parts of the house being painted, decorated, and hung with collages of people long gone. Even the program here has a history to go with the history of the city.

I'm living a dream right now. I haven't yet gotten accustomed to the time difference, resulting in me not sleeping almost at all last night, so this really might all be a dream, having not slept at all for the past 48 hours. But what a blessed dream it is. Thank you God.

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