Getting settled in Florence

Sorry I haven’t posted that much lately. We’re really busy in Italy and have had some problems getting on the internet regularly, so it’s been hard to do the blog.  But we’ve been in Italy for a couple weeks and it’s really great!  Because we’re having a lot of problems time-wise and internet-wise, we’re going to just post some pictures with captions and combine some of the stuff we’ve done in Italy.

We got to Florence and settled into our apartment on via Pier San Maggiore.  We’re in a great location, right near the Duomo, one of the main things in Florence – a huge cathedral with a giant dome on top (as you can see in the video we posted!).  There’s also a tall belltower, called the Campanile, and a building called the Baptistery where children used to get baptized.  They are all hundreds of years old, and the Baptistery is even more like a thousand years old!  All 3 of these buildings are really interestingly colored – dark green, rosy pink, and white.  They don’t look like any buildings anywhere else (except for the church we saw in Siena, which I’ll talk about later) especially in America!

To me, in some areas, Florence is pretty dirty and graffitied, but in most places, there are really old buildings everywhere you look and that is pretty cool.  It’s really neat being in a city, too – there are so many restaurants, great people watching, and you can walk in the streets because there aren’t many cars (though you have to watch out because there are some cars, and lots of crazy bikes!).  There are little narrow backstreets leading to all different places, and beautiful churches and towers and piazzas (which is what they call squares).

We’re also in a great location, store- and food-wise too.  The apartment has a great sandwich shop right nearby and a lot of great restaurants with amazing pizza and pasta, like Mastrocilegia (which we think might mean “master of cherry” -- don’t ask).

We have 5 really good gelato places right near us – our favorite so far is Rivareno.  Gelato is like ice cream but a hundred times creamier and sweeter and I can’t really explain it but it’s SO good.  They have like 50 flavors and the way they’re presented is CRAZY: let’s say the flavor is coconut: they would have real coconut on it sliced in half and the gelato is piled up in these HUGE stacks.  It’s really awesome.  If it was chocolate they’d have huge chocolate bars on it for decoration.  Some of our favorite flavors are cioccolato (chocolate), straciatella (vanilla and chocolate chips), menta (mint), cioccolato bianco (white chocolate), tres di cioccolato (triple chocolate), and the last one is vaniglia e cookies (vanilla and cookies).  We’ve had gelate every single day so far!  (Even twice a couple times).

 

Our apartment is really different than home.  It was really creepy at first.  It is really old, it has huge high ceilings, and it was pretty dark (the hallway light only stays on for 4 seconds before turning off), before we got some lamps.  It’s really big and is usually a dorm for students and mine and Dylan’s room has 4 beds and mom and dad’s room has 3 beds – 7 beds in all if you can’t do the math!   We have a nice kitchen and living room with an amazing arched brick ceiling that it lit by a modern lamp different from the rest of the apartment.  It has a balcony overlooking the street and a little piazza.  It’s really fun to people watch!  I’ve gotten really good at climbing up onto the window (which is really high) to watch the piazza.

Dylan and I decided to make our room a bit more homey.  So we decided to make our beds decorated with stuff we’ve gotten on our trip and give them themes.  Mine is “Casey’s Tropical Hangout” and Dylan’s is “Dylan’s Warrior Hideout.”  Mom, Dylan, and I devised a pulley system that we can use to pass notes from one bed to another (involving a rope and a basket) that is really awesome!

I’ll post more on Florence soon!