Michelle, Molly, and I again jumped on a train and headed out to Lucca on a beautiful Saturday afternoon. Sooooooooo gorgeous here! I loved it so much! The most famous thing about this city is that the original city wall is still intact. So we were able to walk around the whole city along the wall. There's not too terribly much to do here, but it's completely gorgeous and I would love to go back. The main thing we saw people doing was kissing. There were couples everywhere! PDA is so common in Italy, so it was not unusual to see two people sucking face on a bench. I swear I saw at least a hundred couples. Since none of us had a handsome man to love on, we had to entertain ourselves in other ways. After grabbing a delicious lunch of ravioli and tiramisu for dessert (yum!), we set off exploring the city. Because of it's beauty, it's a perfect place to take pictures, and we took about 200 of them! It was a lot of fun. While searching for a bathroom we came upon a Plaza with a carousel, tons of people milling about, and a few boys playing soccer. After finding the water closet (Toilette), we came back to the plaza and snapped some pictures. In doing so, we found ourselves in the line of fire of children spraying each other with canned foam (similar to silly string, but foam not string...). This is typical during Carnevale. We escaped with our lives, and didn't even get hit with foam! Then we went back to the wall and took a few more photos, Molly tried (unsuccessfully) to climb a tree, we saw a man doing Tai Chi, and we saw more couples making out. All in all... A good day!
Everyday Florence
The other day I was scolded by my boyfriend, well more like lovingly reminded, that I should write in my blog more often. So this is my attempt to write as often as possible. I'm going to try and post once a day or at least once every other day. This is going to be quite a task because not only do I have homework, I'm also keeping a journal for my Italian culture class. I'm also trying to do as much as possible here! So, it's all about time management.
I've decided that my three main goals here are to find the best gelato, the best tiramisu, and the best cappuccino. So far, my favorite gelato is from Gelateria dei Neri. It is only a five minute walk from our apartment and is absolutely delicious. My favorite flavors are chocolate, hazelnut, and caramel. I'm sure I will be trying more :) Other gelato places we have tried include Vivoli (super famous, and super close to our apartment, but really just ok not great), Festival del Gelato (a PLETHORA of flavors, I was so overwhelmed! The decor is my favorite so far, super colorful and bright, reminds me of the rainbow track course on Mario Kart...), and an unnamed gelateria near the Duomo (first gelato I tried in Florence, I got a delicious scoop of chocolate, just ok, nothing special). Places to try: Carabe, Grom, Perche No?, and any others we find!
As for the best tiramisu, I haven't tried any in Florence but I had some in Siena and in Lucca... both delicious couldn't decide which was better.
Best cappuccino? My favorite so far is a simple little cafe right by our apartment called Caffe Mario. But some places I have heard are good include Caffe Giacosa (in the fashion district), Il Bigallo, La Loggia (both on Via del Corso), Gilli, and Donnini (both in the Plaza della Republica).
So I'll keep everyone updated on my search! And will hopefully have a long lists of all "the bests" in Florence.
As for food and wine... Right now we're trying to keep it as cheap as possible. We've only eaten out a few times, we mainly make food of our own. We're going to try to make our own pasta sauce and go out of comfort zone with a few other things too. And when it comes to wine, we go for cheap. None of us are big "wine-os" but we like to immerse ourselves in the culture and do like the Italians do. We did find a store called "Il Buffalo Trippone" which had a lot of good wine. But we got distracted by the delicious honey, jams, biscotti, and pasta that they had. Seriously the best honey I have ever tasted in my life. But we will have to go back and get some nice wine and olive oil.
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