Does it Come in Chocolate?

New firsts this week!-

First trip to Firenze (Florence) - On Wednesday we went on our first of 4 official field trips into Firenze. All 4 schools at Santa Chiara rushed to the buses chartered for our trip at 8am with juice boxes in hand (I had peach) and some weird breakfast pre-packaged pastery that tasted kinda like a twinkie. Our first stop on the tour was a beautiful Romanesque church named San Miniato which was located on a hilltop overlooking the city. Breathtaking view! The church itself was really dark inside with small, high windows that barely let any light in. The alter was also up really high and blocked by a short wall....apparently it was to separate the low class from the cleregy. How nice. Pretty much everything was green and white marble, and the windows varied from clear glass to stained glass and thin cut alabaster stone. Located in the back portion of the church was a crypt...some dead guys are buried here....i don't really know who or care. All the columns in this portion of the church were recycled from a previous church that had been torn down. Way to go green medevial town!

Next we made our way into town to Santa Croce- which was an Italian Gothic cathedral with a big star of David on the front. At this point...we're already getting a little tired of beautiful churches. It houses shrines to (and crypts of) a bunch of famous people... Galileo, Dante, Michelangelo so on and so forth. I get the feeling we'll visit a bunch more dead people before this semester is up.

Now the most important part of the day- LUNCH. We were all ushered into a little resturant on a side street where we took up almost all of the tables in the place. First was tortellini with what I think was a cream tomato crab sauce, then some meat (we actually aren't sure what it was, pork maybe?) and loads of vino rosso di casa. Then...class. Not a good choice after lunch and vino. Our science and technology class was held and the Museo di Galileo by our Italian professor Giovanni. He showed us some cool relics that mostly dealt with science and technology...and then sat us down to teach us something. Cue food coma. It was like highschool all over again. oops.

That was pretty much all for the field trip that day. The real fun came on Saturday when we went to the once a year CHOCOLATE FESTIVAL. It warrented all cap letters, that's how amazing it was. First, I should start with our train fiasco. A large group of KSU kids were traveling to florence Saturday morning so we gave ourselves about 15-20 minutes to buy train tickets. It wasn't enough. On the weekend there's no one at the ticket counter so you have to buy from one of the two kiosks. In front of us was the whole San Antonio's group and a bunch of other people...most of which who have never used the kiosk and don't know any Italian. This led to frantic button pushing...which led to a frozen machine and a bunch of KSU students unable to buy tickets in time for the train. So we waited about 90 minutes to get the next train (which was a 2 hour one with tons of stops, as opposed to the first one which was only an hour). During the wait, we went to an amazing pastery place near the station called "La Perla" where I had the most beautiful cappiccino ever made. Pictures were taken to capture its beauty. Finally, we made it on the train and were off to the Chocolate fest!

The piazza in front of Santa Croce was filled with chocolate vendors selling tons of goodies, and even giving a few samples out. I had a cabob of dark chocolate covered strawberries and some chocolate covered orange slices...rediculously amazing. There was also chocolate beer, rum, edible shot glasses (they were basically empty reeses shaped cups)....too many amazing things to list. We met up with some of the girls from Orvieto (shout out to Coop!) and basically shopped the day away! The Orvieto girls left in the afternoon so Kelsey, Cara and I did some people watching on the steps of Santa Croce. After we had been sitting there for awhile, a Medevial band in full costume started marching around the fair. While we were watching some intense flag flowing, Cara and I mused about how many distracted people were getting pick-pocketted at that moment.

Another thing about Firenze- Too many Asian tourists. Of course they all had their cameras out all the time. Cara took a picture of some groups taking pictures. It felt like there weren't many actual Italians in the city, so coming home to Castiglion F.No (as it's written on the train stop sign) is always refreshing.

And now- it's Packers Time! We're going to the Velvet Underground tonight to watch the Super Bowl. Should've brought my cheese head.....

Next post- Our trip to orvieto from Friday...

ps- there's no spell check on this blog thing and I'm usually typing as fast as possible while doing 50 other things before the internet crashes....this should be a sport. So sorry for the mistakes, i'm sure there's a million!