News and Gaffes from Florence

Thursday
Pretty uneventful day. No one was going out from our class, so we made our own fun. We had hoped to watch Game 4 of the NBA finals, but it wasn't airing until 3am here, so we changed our plans.

We forgot to eat dinner, minus some pizza from a little spot around the corner from Monash during our break (they sell pizza by weight there, cut to order), which explains the detrimental effects of the wine we had now that I think about it.

We went back to the same Irish pub hoping to make some friends. We are on the fence, trying to decide whether we would rather hang out with Americans, where there would be no problem communicating, or Italians, who would be able to take us around to all the great spots and show us a better time, while struggling to communicate. It's the age-old dilemma. For this night, we opted to American. We met a group of people and went to a club with them. That lasted about 20 minutes before the princess of the group suddenly decided everyone had to go home. We walked home ourselves.

Friday
I awoke to our door buzzing. Someone was coming up. Turns out it was the guy who had let us in on Monday and another older gentleman (picture the most typical old, Italian man you can, then put a scooter helmet in his hand). He was dropping off a huge bag of blankets and sheets for us. No idea why he thought we needed so many, but it was a nice gesture. He also fixed my shower so it no longer leaks (read: wastes us tons of money on utilities).

I have been searching for things to do with our long weekend, now that Paris is out of the picture. If we had another day, we would consider a trek from Florence to Siena, which looks absolutely incredible. Five days walking through ancient Italy. We would have to skip a class or two if we wanted to do it, and that is assuming we could plan it last minute and leave today. Not meant to be, unfortunately. Some of the people in our class are talking about going to Siena on Sunday, which is a medieval town full of castles and the like. For now, that is the plan. I'm sure we can/will find something else interesting for a day trip tomorrow.

For breakfast, we made eggs again. No one out here appears to believe in spiciness. We tried saute-ing those hot peppers into the butter we used to grease the pan. Two things went wrong, hence today's title (gaffes). One, as Johnny was stirring the peppers around in the butter, the pan took a leap off of the burner and hit the deck, sending boiling butter and red peppers everywhere. No injuries. The second gaffe materialized a little later. We both started sneezing and getting really runny noses out of nowhere. All of a sudden we realized that, in trying to infuse the butter with some spicy peppers, we actually created homemade pepper spray and let the steam diffuse it throughout our dining room. We were almost teary-eyed when we realized what we had done.

We made it through, and the eggs ended up being pretty delicious, though still not spicy. We might have to spring for the 4 Euro bottle of Tabasco after all.

We expect to meet up with some classmates tonight in Central Park (I think that's what the area is called, but it was the French who told us about it and they were unsure of the name...in any language).

Ciao.