I'm Here!

Some of the lovely items for sale at the Mercato View from our window Arno River After about 17 hours of traveling I finally made it to my apartment here in Florence. My flight went pretty well I slept for about 5 hours of it and watched movies and read for the remainder of the time. I did not have much of a dinner because of a food mix up leaving me with only meat choices so when breakfast rolled around I was starving. It was the best croissant I have ever had!!!

When we got off the airplane  we walked down a flight of stairs and then had to be bussed over to the terminal. Upon entering I was met with the smell of BO. The Rome airport is super gross and old. Air conditioning leaked water everywhere and the luggage took forever. I was a mess with all my big suit cases and almost missed my train to the Rome Train station. Trains don't leave on time here which has turned out to work in my favor as I again almost missed my train from Rome Termini to Florence. That was a EuroStar train and was much nicer than the previous. Only problem was I had gotten on the wrong car and could not get to my seat/car, and had no place for my luggage. It was so awful. I finally just gave up and sat on the ground. There were not a lot of people working on the train and no one came by for quite a while. Then one of the ladies who worked there saw me and took pity on me and told  me to sit in the dining room part of the car. Turns out I had gotten on the first class car..whoops.

I finally arrived at the Florence train station and took a cab over to my school and signed in and got my keys. My apartment is super close to the school and the Mercato Centrale. It's small but cute and I like it a lot so far. From seeing on the map where the other apartments are we defiantly lucked out. I'll put up pictures soon! My roommate Jordan was already there so we went out for a walk and to explore a little. We came back and 2 of the other girls were there so we went and bought fruit from the market. One of the girls has family here and is pretty fluent so we relied on her a lot to tell them what we wanted. It's not like at home where you pick out your own fruit and veggies, you are not aloud to touch them and the people who work there get it for you. After that we went to one of the restaurants that we live above and had lunch. 

When we got back I took a nice nap and then our landlord, Vincenzo, came and showed us how everything in our apartment works and set up the Internet. The washing machine is soooo weird and we don't have a dryer, you just hang it out back on a line to dry. All over the city you see people clothes and sheets out to dry. Everything else in the kitchen is normal, just a bit smaller than what we are used to. We have 2 bathrooms (complete with bidets) but only one teeny tiny shower.

After all that we just wandered around for a while, visited the Duomo and then found a pizzeria and had dinner and then walked around for a little more! Tomorrow we plan on doing some more grocery shopping and I want to look for shoes!