Post-Siena/Firenze

Ciao!

This weekend was phenomenal and I LOVED Tuscany! The wine tasting at Traquanda at 11:00 in the morning on Friday was intense and it was so fun. We really got to spend a lot of time together as a group just hanging out and enjoying the Italian culture. We also met a lot of people from other schools which is a plus side and the main objective in studying abroad. Traquanda was a quaint town in Tuscany about an hour away from Siena and 2 hours away from Firenze. It was great and we got a tour of the winery and information on what it takes to make the wines, etc. I also bought a couple of bottles and need to now figure a way to get them on the plane.

We checked into the hotel (Best Western in Siena) around 18:00 and took an hour nap so we could be ready for dinner at the hotel with the entire group at 20:00. Sadly, the dinner we had at the hotel was not even comparable to the lunch we had in Traquanda. The lunch was so insanely delicious that Ashley and I felt the need to photo document each course as well as the wine, so you will see these on my Webshots account very, very soon. After dinner, Stefano and Chiara (our chaperones from AUR staff) arranged for the bus that we took to Tuscany to take us into the town of Siena. When we got to Siena, it was nothing that we had expected. Being used to Roma and all of it’s liveliness, Siena was far from this life that we live in the city. There was little to nothing open and we were only in search of a bar or a restaurant that was open that we could sit at and enjoy each other’s company. After 20 minutes of walking, the huge group stumbled upon an Irish pub and we sat for awhile talking and just spending low-key time together. We were way too tired at this point to go out and party and had absolutely no intentions to do so.

We got back to the hotel at 23:30, which is a very early night for us, and passed out as soon as our heads hit the pillow. We were all so burnt out from the traveling and wine tasting that we were excited to be able to sleep. My accommodations in the hotel room were hilarious. The mattress was ridged, so basically, if I was laying on my stomach, which is how I generally sleep, there were parts in the mattress (just from general wear and tear) that my legs fit right into. Talk about an old mattress! Oh, and it was a cot, which was fine. It was just the worst mattress known to mankind.

The next morning it was rise and shine at 7:00 in order to eat breakfast and be on the bus to Firenze. It was roughly a 2 hour ride and we slept and listened to our ipod’s the entire way. Thank God for the ipod; I would be lost without it. When we got to Firenze we had a 2 hour guided tour with expert tour guides who took us to all of the main sites in Firenze. Firenze is such a beautiful city, however I am very happy to be studying in Roma vs. Firenze. Firenze is a tad too quiet for my liking and much too touristy. It’s funny because I pictured Roma to be much more tourist oriented than Firenze, but it is very far from that. In Roma, your tourists are few and far between compared to the masses that were in Firenze. Upon the conclusion of our guided tour, we found a restaurant and Piazza San Marco and had some lunch. I split a Marinara pizze with Ashley and it was delicious! After lunch we climbed to the top of the Duomo, did some more sightseeing and picture taking and then did some shopping. I bought a few cute things for myself and some things for others. The straw markets are a GREAT place to shop, you just need to be careful of the pick-pockets in them. It’s a very crowded area and prime spot for the thieves.

Firenze was a great city and hopefully someday I will make it back. We definitely could have spent much more time there and we all wished that we were staying over in fun Firenze versus mildly dull Siena. We went out after dinner on Saturday night in Siena. We followed the entire AUR Study Abroad group to this bar where typically many Americans hang out and it was just that. It’s always so comforting to have Americans around you; it’s a sense of strange security, or what have you. The bar was very fun until it was time to go home. At 3am we lef the bar and tried to hail a cab. Needless to say, no cabs were running at this hour. Now, this is unheard of. There is no way that there were no cabs running at this hour – we think they did not want to pick up Americans because they assumed we were going to be loud and boisterous. After about an hour of sitting at the Piazza trying to get a cab, we all just decide to walk, except no one knows how to get back to the hotel. Long and short of the story is that we had to call some of our friends who were already back at the hotel because we needed them to give us directions. The concierge at the front desk of the hotel was assisting in the direction process and 20 of us walked from the bar to the hotel. All in all it was about an hour walk. We didn’t get back to the hotel until around 5:00am. We went to bed and then woke up at 7:50. Shy of three hours of sleep does not cut it for me.

Today, we had a walking tour of Siena bright and early and then had free time to ourselves to do whatever. We did some more sightseeing and grabbed lunch with all of the girls and some boys we met from the University of Maryland. The entire bus ride back to Roma (all 5 hours of it) was spent catching up on sleep from the night before, or lack thereof.

I will write soon.
Ciao ciao ciao!