I am trying to stay on top of my blog as best as I can. I think it is a great way to stay in touch with all of you and for me to look back on at the end of my trip and recall all the great memories I have made.

Classes Started on Monday September 1st. We are all taking Italian Mon-Thurs for the first 5 weeks we are here. I am really enjoying it because I cannot wait to ‘really’ speak with the locals. Right now I am still getting by on my English-Spanish-Italian, pointing and hand signals. Even though we cannot speak the language yet, when I here someone speaking English it takes us a minute to realize, hey we can understand that!! They play a lot of English music here…older songs mixed in with a few new, mostly dance music…90’s!!! It is as if they are about 5-10 years behind on the music… we listened to some N*sync and Backstreet boys in the café the other night.

Tuesday we went to wine tasting before dinner and it happened to be the birthday of one of the guys on our trip. We sat in the wine cellar for our wine tasting of a family owned winery. Crociani. The gave us bread with our wine and we learned that traditional Tuscan bread does not contain salt because of a strike during medieval times when taxes went up. They continue to bake their bread without salt but dip it in olive oil and salt…not pepper and balsamic vinaigrette as much. We also had some meats and cheese with the wine… my new favorite cheese is Pecorino (sheep cheese). Ok more about the wines… we had a white and two reds… Bianco “Unpodiba,” Vino Nobile di Montepulciano 2006 and a Reserve Vino Nobile di Montepulciano 2005. Then we tried Grappa di vinacce di Nobile (made from the skins of the grapes so the alcohol content is very high). After we went to dinner and then went out that night to the Garden Bar at the bottom of our town with our entire group and two of our professors. They have pool tables, foosball, air hockey and ping pong. It was FUN!!!

Wednesday was a long day for some people as Tuesday was a late night! It was just a day of classes and an early night to bed. We did have our first Art history class and our professor is Italian, from Florence. He is very knowledgeable but mixes Italian and English so we had a bit of a hard time following him at first…

We finished our classes for the week on Thursday and went to the farmers market that comes to our town on Thursday mornings only. We bought some tomatoes to add to our sandwiches we were making to take with us on the bus to Florence. The tomatoes are DELICOUS!!! They are so red and juicy and flavorful!!!!

I will save our Florence and Cinque Terre trip for another post---coming soon!
I don’t want to upload to much at one time and overload the internet over here!