This weekend was the first weekend we traveled, on Friday our program brought us up to the Medici Villa. It's where the Medici family lived in Florence(they are a big deal around here)and where the king, his wife and his affair lived when Florence was the capitol of Italy way back when(haven't gotten the history down yet). The house was amazing and the gardens surrounded the villa and looked over all of Florence, absolutely breathtaking.

Then Saturday, a group of about 10 of us went through a program called Bus2Alps to Venice for the day. The bus ride took about 3 hours but the scenery of Italy was incredible! Once we got there we got an all day waterbus pass and took the waterbus to the island of Burano. The houses were all rainbow colored and placed right on the canals, its one of my favorite places I have been so far, definitely somewhere I would love to go back to! After Burano, we took another waterbus to the main island of Venice and to be honest it wasn't what I expected it to be. Don't get me wrong, it was amazing how there is a city built on water, but it didn't give you the feeling that places like Burano and Medici Villa gave you. But, we walked around for a while, got some dinner, vino and most importantly gelato and headed back to the bus station. Venice at night was a different story, taking the waterbus through the grand canal was gorgeous! After a long day we headed back to Firenze and arrived at 1:30 in the morning only to get up 5 hours later to be back at the train station by 7:30 for our beach trip.

Sunday we went with our school(FUA/Palazzi) to Viareggio Beach which is also in Tuscany. Our school reserved a private beach for us with umbrellas, chairs and what not and the water was perfect! Once you got to the edge of the water you could see the mountain in the background..it was awesome! After getting a little sun kissed(sunscrean costs about 20 euro=$30ish) we headed back to the train station where the conductors were on strike so we sat next to the tracks for about 2 more hours waiting for a train to come through. We finally got on one and made it back safe and sound!
Classes started up again today, and unfortunately I don't have mondays off anymore. I dropped one class(supervision and leadership) because the professor had horrible english and asked us to mainly speak with our hands so he could understand...yeah, no. I dropped it and added World Religion which I absolutely love, its so interesting!
Well, thats basically it for now! Love and miss you all!

Ciao begli!!