Today was a long day! We started our historic tour of the city at 10am. Our guide, Tanya, was very good and I learned so much about Firenze from her! It would be impossible to talk about everything I saw because there was just too much! It was definitely a lot to take in. I did rub the porcellino’s (wild boar) nose and drop a coin so that I can sometime return to Florence again. How touristy. I also had my first caffé at the bar. It was like a little (but strong) shot of coffee compared to the regular cups we have back in the States. I’m not a big fan of coffee, but I wanted to have the experience, so I just drowned mine in sugar to ease the pain. We also went to the Ponte Vecchio (bridge) to check out the Arno river. Then we went to check out David (just a replica) at the Piazza della Signoria along with some other statues. Ahh and I got to see the Santa Maria del Fiore cathedral (or Duomo) up close and it is just a beauty!! After the tour, Mildred & I walked around to look for a straightener, but no luck. “C’e una piastra?” lol (I don’t even know if that’s right.) Sometime during all this, we got trippa (tripe) and lampredotto panini which were yummy! After that, we took a walk to find leather jackets, which ended up being a really long detour, and somehow we ended up at the Oltrarno (other side of the river) at the Pitti Palace where the Medici family lived. haha It was a nice walk though.  I really feel like walking around made me more familiar to the city and now I can get around without being so disoriented because I know the streets a lot more. We finally found the leather jackets, but since the vendors overprice everything for Americans, we need someone good at negotiating and bartering when we go next time. We went back home to get our laptops so we could go to the Internet Train and go online. But Internet Train failed us, so we just went to a little internet shop by our apartment and went online for an hour. It only cost us 1.50/hour. This place didn’t have wifi though, so we couldn’t use our laptops. We had to use their crappy PC computers that were in Italian. Even the keyboard was different- I was struggling just trying to find the “@” symbol. 

We found out that it was gonna rain hard tomorrow so we decided to get our groceries today. We went to Il Centro supermercato and bought food and other stuff we needed. This is when I realized that grocery shopping in Italy is not as simple as you may think.. especially when you can’t understand what labels say. Nonetheless, we bought a lot of stuff and had to lug it all back to our apartment. Our elevator-less apartment. We’re only on the 2nd floor, but it’s still quite a climb and those stairs are pretty steep. My purchases included 2 liter bottles of peach iced tea, laundry detergent, fabric softener, toilet paper, 2 big jars of tomato sauce, 2 kinds of cooked pastas, mineral water, cans of tuna, hand soap, and a lot more.. so you can just imagine how heavy that load was! I was surprised to find Cup o’ Noodles there, but guess how much they were? 2.60. each! NOT HAPPENING. You can get those for like 4/$1.00 and they’re not even that great! Soo ridic. I find myself eating a lot of tonno and prosciutto. Good stuff. We were pretty tired after that so we just chilled (literally, because it was freezing!) in the apartment and read guidebooks and studied maps. Not that exciting but it’s Sunday and not a lot of stuff are open anyway. Apparently, it’s against some Italian law to have your heater on higher than a set temperature. As a Californian, I’m having a very hard time adjusting to that law. Anyway, I need to freshen up on my Italian because I have a placement exam on Wednesday. Ciao!