i actually have to go to school?

^the view from our hotel

after our full day of travel to siena, we ended up in this gorgeous italian town. our hotel is pretty sweet- i live with lauren and natalie who are two of my four roommates in our apartment once we get to florence. lauren is legit i like her a lot- she's involved with young life plus we hang out with the same people here (hi lauren if you read this...you're sitting next to me. i like you a lot). so the night we got here we had this welcome dinner and drink thing at this super fancy restaurant. we had a 5 course meal which was insanely good. i love italian food. it destroys england food. dinner lasted like 3 hours...that's just how they do it here. so it was fun and we sat with new people and just talked and drank wine all night. yesterday was mostly orientation stuff and meetings, etc. we did get to walk around the city a bit and explore. it's beautiful, contained by these huge walls and everything is made of stone. we found this sweet outdoor market with all this cheap vintage stuff. it was really quaint and non-touristy which i love. italians don't seem to like us too much, probably because we are a huge group of loud americans and when we walk together we get stares. not many people speak english well or at all here. lauren, kayla, jeanne and i were walking down the street by ourselves just talking normally and these guys snorted at us like we're american pigs? we weren't even being obnoxious. we signed up for all these sweet activities and day trips over the next two weeks which is cool. last night we had another drinks party at our school and then went out for a bit. we stopped to get gelato and made friends with these older men there. but when they started asking us "where we sleep" we left. but not before they gave us this huge plate of free sandwiches. when we got back to the hotel we found a bunch of people sitting on the 7th floor terrace so we got some bottles of wine and went up and chilled out there. it was lovely and it's not too cold here! but once there were too many of us we got kicked out for being too loud. so lauren, kayla, jeanne and i just came back and talked...all night? by accident. going to bed after 3 was dumb because we had to get up at 730 to start classes. 4 hours of italian class for two weeks straight is a lot. i'm a bit overwhelmed. people keep saying they don't know any italian but then in class people seem to know way more. like when i say i don't know italian...i do not know italian. at all. ciao. working on it. lauren and i are in the same class so that's fun. it's split up to like 12 students per class and we play little games. it's taking me a little bit to catch on though. but i'll get the hang of it. i just forgot i actually had to go to class here. after class we had more meetings. i'm signing up to do volunteer work in florece, hopefully with kids or helping out at a food bank. should be fun. we've been chilling in our room a bit and the internet is finally working! some. and now we're going to dinner. ciao bella!

sweet phones from the outdoor market

drinks on the terrace