Florence, Day 2

I am, not surprisingly, still jet-lagged. However dinner last night helped a lot. Breakfast this morning helped even more! The hotel provides a bit of food for us, croissants and freshly baked rolls, with our choice of nutella, jam, or other fruit preserves, plus coffee (or hot chocolate or my new favorite chocolate mocha-chino (which the coffee machine helpfully says is "1/3 chocolate, 1/3 coffee, 1/3 steamed milk" - delicious).

After breakfast, Gretchen, Sammy, Isa, Stacy, (the same girls I went to dinner with earlier) and I went out on the sightseeing tour that I looked up the previous night. We ended up riding the bus up to San Miniato and the Piazza Michelangelo, where we got out to take in the view from a (very crowded) scenic overlook. After some group pictures (you'll see that below), we walked up to the church, saw the end of a wedding, explored a cemetery, and looked around the "farmacia" run by the order of monks that still live and work at this church. Cool.

(L to R) Stacy, Isa, Sammy, Gretchen, and me.

After that, the day got even better. We waited around in the courtyard to see the end of the wedding, and kind of in order to see the church some more, and the moment the bride and groom exited the sanctuary... it started to pour. We're talking buckets and buckets of rain. But we found out that in Italy, a torrential downpour on your wedding isn't a bad thing. "A wet bride is a lucky bride." Take that any way you please.

The five of us (Gretchen, Sammy, Isa, Stacy, and myself) took cover in a smaller, even older church father down the hill where we attempted to wait out the storm, figuring that it would be a relatively short storm and that would be that. Wrong. We finally screwed our courage to the sticking point, hoisted our sopping umbrellas once more, and made it down the hill to the bus stop. Waiting for the bus was an ordeal all its own (where the bus that I was sure would take us on the rest of the tour didn't seem to exist and then the bus we decided to use instead wouldn't let us on because "they were full"), but we made it back to the hotel, checked into our new room (yes, all five of us were put in the same room for the next few days. We're ok with it. Don't judge.), changed out of our wet clothes, and then met up with the ACM people for a first round of paperwork/getting to know each other/orientation followed by dinner at a nice restaurant ristorante. (For those keeping score at home: butterfly pasta with a vegetable sauce and roast pork with sauté spinach and the house wine.) The program director and coordinator (Jodi and Kate, respectively) then took us out for gelato - which I could get used to.

Veni, vidi, vici - except instead of coming, seeing, and conquering, I came, I saw, I ate, I talked, and then I went to bed.