Inaugural Post

Greetings everyone from Italy!

This is going to be my blog while I'm abroad; I'm not sure how often it will be updated but check back every now and then if you want to see what I've been up to.

Today is January 17th, which means it's my 5th full day in Florence. I will try to give a brief summary of what I've been up to so far. The first few days all the American students stayed in a hotel near the city center. Not much to report as most of it was spent recovering from the long flight. Oh, they made us get up at 7:30 am every day. On the third day we moved in with our host families. I live with Daniela di Bacco, a single woman with a 19 year old daughter (Luisa) and a 16 year old son (Paul0). Luisa is studying at university in Milan right now, but Paulo is here. My mom is super super nice, she wants to do everything for me, and is always going out of her way to take care of me. Everything so far has been very structured, so I haven't had a ton time to go out and explore, but I've still spent a decent number of hours walking around the city. A few nights ago I hopped on a bus that takes me right to the center to meet up with some friends, which was one of my first times being on my own and needing to use Italian. A lot of things are tricky to do here without speaking Italian, but I am learning very quickly I think. We start classes tomorrow, so I anticipate my rate of learning accelerating in the next week. Hopefully.

Last night my mama took me out into Tuscany to meet her sister, sister's friend, mom, and stepfather. This is a picture from the back porch:
I spent the whole time as the only man there (her step-father was only there for dinner) while the rest of them cooked and talked only in Italian. The other women didn't speak English. But they talked to me the whole time. Ay. My brain was very tired. Also, they kept making me drink wine. Although I am trying very hard to learn while I am here, right now I don't like wine. And they just kept pouring me more, and I kept choking it down. After dinner they poured me a glass of liquor which tasted even nastier than the wine. I choked that down too. Ay.

Any time we go anywhere, my mama tells me how American I am. Oh well. The people here are generally friendly towards Americans, I think especially so if you show an effort of trying to learn the language and culture.

Well, that's all I can think of for now.