arrival.

alright, so i’ve decided to document as much of this year as possible. we’ll see how long this lasts before i get lazy :)

I arrived in Italy on August 24 with all the kiddos- all 42 of them, which is WAY more than we had last year, and that’s just one particular group of students. We have many others who have been arriving over the past few days. Anyways. We flew into Rome and then took a bus to the town of Tuscania, which is about an hour and a half north of Rome.

Tuscania's a cute little town, but I’m sure glad that I don’t live there. One week was plenty! I felt like I had gone in a time warp back to the 70's - from the way people dressed to seeing young children flailing around in the backseats of cars, not strapped into a carset. Tuscania was, however, full of my 3 favorite things: dogs, babies and pizza. And not just your everyday pizza margherita- we’re talking white pizza topped with mozzarella, gorgonzola, and onions, or salsiccia, mozzarella, and broccoli rabe. For that alone I’d maybe go back. I also had pasta one night  from Locanda di Mirandolina with a tiny bit of pesto, fiori di zucca (zucchini flowers), asparagus, and truffle.



Enough about food for now. We spent friday afternoon in Rome and we saw mostly everything, which meant we did LOTS of walking and it was about 1 million degrees (typical late-August Roman weather!) out so it was a little miserable, but the kiddos enjoying it a lot (at least I think…18 year olds are hard to read) We also spent a day at Bolsena Lake which wasn’t far from Tuscania. It was beautiful- we even took a little boat ride around the lake and stopped in the middle for everyone to jump into the water.

Now we’re all back in Florence and have been so busy with orientation activities and moving people into their apartments so not a whole lot of fun has happened, mostly working until 10pm and making sure everyone knows where they’re going, where to go grocery shopping, where to buy a bike, and have them turn in all their paperwork. It’s wednesday, and I’ve been here since Sunday, and I finally am fully unpacked.