Ciao!
I have finally made it to my home stay!! It's official, I have an Italian family :). For the next 14 weeks I will be living with my house mom, Barbara, her two sons, Tomasso (28) and Andrea (16), Megan the dog, Stella the cat, and my housemate, Kelly from UC Berkeley. The apartment is AMAZING. For those unfamiliar with Florence, I live on the south side of the Arno (the river that runs through Florence) in a residential area. This side of Florence is very beautiful, quiet, and clean compared to the center of the city. I showed up at the apartment around 1 p.m. and was greeted by Megan, Andrea, and Barbara. Andrea speaks the most English of the three, but not very much. Barbara knows some broken English and Tomasso barely knows any. It has been somewhat challenging trying to communicate with them but also kind of fun. Kelly is HUGE help, she is ten times better at Italian than me and is able to translate most of what I need to say, but I still plan on speaking with them in Italian by the time I leave here. It would be nice if I could wake up tomorrow knowing the language but I suppose it will just have to be a process!
After Kelly showed up, Barbara offered to take us into town to see the bus route. Unfortunately, my school is about 25 minutes on the bus, but I'm hoping to get my hands on a used bike so that I can take the bike path to school instead. After she showed us the bus stop, we decided to walk back into the city to meet up with Kelly's mom and get food. At this point, I had only eaten 2 fruit leathers, an espresso, and some water all day so I was STARVING. After we met up with her mom at a caffe near the Duomo, we went to find Ana's apartment. She is staying in an apartment that overlooks the Arno with three other girls from UCSB. Her apartment is really nice and very old fashioned. I wouldn't mind living closer to school, but I am overall very happy with my homestay so far.
Kelly and I came back to the apartment around 6:30 with her mom so that she could meet the family and then Barbara began to prepare our "feast" which is just normal dinner to them. We ate around 8:30 and we had a great time talking about everything from surfing to CSI. Andrea is a typical teenage boy and went straight to playing video games on the couch as soon as he was released from the table. Since I noticed they had a Wii, I decided to challenge him to a couple games and we played for a while. After that, I finally took a shower/bath, Kelly and I share a bathroom that has a tub with a shower nozel but no shower curtain... so basically you have to sit down in order to not get water everywhere. But now I am just trying to wind down for the night and beat my jet lag. Tomorrow is orientation back at school. I think I finally find out when I have class!
And last but not least, here is my address! (Hint, hint) :) In case any of your feel like you want to send me something. Thanks for reading!
Via Kyoto, 2
50126, Firenze FI
Italy
Ciao!
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