I'm too cold to think of a catchy title.

It’s 1:30am and I’m sitting in my bed with my wool coat on, eating a bowl of cereal. IT’S COLD. If you don’t know, the heat in Florence is controlled by the city.  In our apartment, it’s only on for eight hours a day.  So, from 6pm to 12am and from 6am to 8am, it’s gets almost warm in here. Standing by the radiator (yes, the radiator) helps.  The rest of the time, thanks to a lot of single pane windows and tile floors, it is quite chilly. On the bright side, the store brand (Conad) of Special K with red berries really has a lot of red berries, not just strawberries. I think I see raspberries, strawberries and cherries. Yum!

Today, Alex and I were supposed to be at the school at noon to meet with a group that was going to walk to the Fuji Studio, another part of SACI’s campus.  We have class there on Monday (batik…I’m so excited!) and we were supposed to meet our professors and get familiar with the route to the studio.  Of course, Alex and I got lost on the way to Palazzo dei Cartelloni, SACI’s main building. Thanks to our bad sense of direction, we had to find the Fuji studios on our own. On the way, we ran into our new buds Kristen and Kim, who were also late, and then we got lost again.

The entire day can pretty much be summed up by saying, “we got lost.” That’s ok, though. I can’t remember being lost in a more beautiful place. 

Sometime, while we were lost and confused, we stopped at a coffee bar and I had an espresso machiatto.  I will definitely think Starbucks is gross when I get home.  Ohhh that one tiny cup of espresso was so wonderful.  It was worth getting lost.

Eventually, we went on a walking tour of Florence with Helen, SACI’s infamous art history professor.  It was like walking through my art history textbook. We had to duck out early so that we could get to the phone store before it closed (I got a tiny little phone so I can get up with people here!), and then went to dinner at ZaZa’s with our lovely new friends.  I had ravioli with a bolognese sauce and a glass of wine…it wasn’t bad for my first Italian dinner out.

So, happy Saturday to everyone back home!  I doubt that these blogs will be as frequent once classes get started (Monday!) and I get the hang of things around here…they will probably become more interesting, though.  Love to everyone who has taken the time to read this!

[Nicholas, if you’re reading this, be safe traveling to Texas tomorrow. So exciting!!]