Only two weeks left in Italia, oh boy! Emily just got home from Paris and is now unpacking and repacking her suitcases. We are fretting a little bit about getting all our stuff home! I should (key word – should) be okay because I had Jake bring home a small suitcase of presents and Andrea brought a few things home for me as well.
We have the holiday music on 24/7 in our apartment and I am getting very excited for Christmas! Our Italian teacher told us that in Italy Santa comes on December 12th and on Christmas day everyone opens a stocking. The city also turned on all the decorative lights and the streets look beautiful at night. Apparently it is a local joke that every year the lights are turned on sooner and sooner, this year they waited until December 1st. Look at my pictures to see one of the main streets all lit up.
This weekend turned out to be a really nice time. Thursday night after class I went with my professor and a classmate to a Catholic mass in Italian at a local church. Then a nun who spoke English brought us back to her home and told us about her life and the commitments of being a nun. It was really interesting and a part of some research I am doing for a paper on monasticism.
On Friday morning Lexi and Jackie went with me to meet that same teacher, Simon, and 4 others at the bus station to go to Santa Brigda. This is a small town in the Tuscan countryside with a monastery. The hour bus ride ended up being awful because of the hilly roads and we ended up all getting car sick. When we finally got there we hiked up to the monastery that was basically on a small mountain! The weather turned out to be clear skies and the scenery was beautiful. After taking pictures and looking around the monastery we went back to Simon’s house where his wife prepared a delicious lunch for us. It was really nice of then to host us for the afternoon and show us around the city, it was a wonderful experience! The only bad thing was that everything was a bit rushed because there was another transportation strike on Friday. It started at 3:30 in the afternoon so we needed to make sure we were on our way back to Florence before then or we would have been trapped in Santa Brigda for 8 hours!
When we got back we walked around the Christmas Market that is set up in Piazza Santa Croce.
On Saturday we walked around Florence and went to a shop that Jackie found a couple weeks ago that has awesome pictures of the street I live on. I bought one of those and the last of my Christmas presents. At night the three of us when to an English mass at the Duomo where the priest from Ireland gave a really inspiring homily. After mass we went to dinner and then chilled at home for the rest of the evening.
Today has been pretty uneventful, just doing homework and looking at the 230 pictures Emily took in Paris. Tomorrow starts our last week of classes and then one week of exams and we are done. On Sunday we are having our last roommate dinner together before families get here and things get crazy with finals. The following Friday there is a farewell party given by the school. My Italian class is singing two songs called Baci (Kisses) and Bianco Natale (White Christmas) at the party, which should be pretty entertaining to say the least.
Well, Happy December and see you in 2 weeks!
Love, Katie
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