Florence

Florence is a great city! Our hotel was right at the base of the Duomo (Florence's famous cathedral). Every time I walked out the door I passed about 17 gelato shops within 3 minutes...I think I gave in to the temptation about 2-3 times a day on average! Anyways, most of our time in Florence was focused on art - some of the most famous art out of the Reniassance is housed in Florence.

However, we still managed to do lots of other stuff during our time in Florence, too. Our first full day there, a big group of us got up super early and walked to the train station and then got on a train to Cinque Terre, which is this region on the West coast of Italy made up of 5 little towns. There are trails and train tracks between each of the towns so you can travel between them. We got off the train at the first town, Riomaffiore, and walked to the next town, Manarola. The walk was along the coast on these incredible Mediterranean cliffs - it was SO beautiful! Also, between those two towns is the "Via dell' Amore" - the tunnel of love. All along the tunnle people write their names and messages to their loved ones. Everyone with a boyfriend or girlfriend was writing their names, so those of us who are single wrote our names with a blank spot underneath to be filled in at a later time. We called it the Westmont Singles Wall :). After the tunnel we took a train to the thir town, Cornglia, and had lunch. The guys left us to hike to the 4th town and go swimming, but they missed out on some incredible spaghetti with pesto! After we ate we split up some more and a couple of us took the train to the fourth town, Vernazza, which happened to be my favorite of the five. It was tiny and cute with a little harbor. We walked around the corner at the harbor, and there were our guy friends jumping off a huge rock into the ocean. In November. We sat there watching them and enjoying the sun for a while before we got on the train to go to the final town, Monterosso. There we sat on the beach for a while and ate gelato (for something new and different!). I can't really explain how serene and beautiful Cinque Terre was - it was a great day!

Along with lots of museums and churches, climbing to the top of the Duomo, and our day at Cinque Terre, we also go to celebrate Thanksgiving in Florence. Due to availability of the church, we didn't get to celebrate until the day after Thanksgiving, but it didn't really matter, because they don't have Thanksgiving in Italy, so we just pretended :). In the morning we had "Eurobowl '07" aka Thanksgiving morning football game. We all walked over to a little park and had a great football game. I didn't play because I had to leave early to go pick up some pies for our dinner, but I watched everyone and took pictures and enjoyed the pretty park we were in. Then I left with Barb (our professor's wife and our replacement mom for the semester) to go pick up pumpkin pies for dinner. After that, we met everyone at the church we had rented out for the night, and we started cooking! Somehow, between us all, we managed to cook an AMAZING dinner for 47 people. We had tons of turkey, garlic mashed potatoes, stuffing, cranberry sauce, fruit salad, green beans, yams, rolls, cranberry bread, pumpkin pie, pecan pie, apple crisp with ice cream, hot chocolate, and hot apple cider...it was a great meal! It was a great day with our Europe family. We all ate around one (REALLY big) table and I was completely content. It was truly a time to remember just how blessed we are!

overall a great, gelato-filled week with my Europe Semester family :)