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Friday, March 21, 2003
I had a great experience this morning: I ate a banana two seconds after buying it from a fresh fruit stand in the Mercato Centrale, and it was delicious.
I also took my last midterm today, and so hence ends my first week of work since I got here. All the midterms were fairly easy, aside from the cooking course, which asked just way too many questions about the benefit of cabbage.
Been awhile since I updated, so I guess I'll start with last weekend. The whole API group went to Lucca for the day, which is about an hour or so west. It's a nice little town that, although it was actually Florence's biggest rival way back when, reminds me the most of Florence. It was also freezing because of the wind, and that always makes a trip a bit less enjoyable. One of the things I enjoyed the most there was the outer walls surrounding the city. Lucca was one of the only cities that didn't fall to the Medici family of Florence - in fact, they never even were attacked! So their entire wall fortifications are still there, and it's very impressive.
After that, the group went to the nearby city of ... I think it's called Cascine, but I never really figured out the name of the place. Most of the people went to the naturally heated pool, but since I didn't feel like sitting around in a pool with a whole bunch of old Italian men for two hours, me and a few other people just walked around the city. Or should I say town, because it only took about ten minutes to walk halfway around the circumference of the town. And it was more like a suburb than a classic Italian city, and we only saw one cafe in the entire place. So that was pretty uneventful.
Sunday we just pretty much hung around until Will and Amy called in the evening, so we went to meet them and then brought them back to our place for dinner. We spent the next day, Monday, walking around Florence with them, and then went out to dinner at a place right on the Arno. Two of their friends came in from France the next day, so they've been enjoying Florence while I've been taking care of these troublesome midterms. Today we're planning on finally visiting the Academmia in a half hour; hopefully the line won't be too long.
There's been a large number of peace demonstrations since the war started yesterday, and it makes me wonder if the same thing is going on back home. Anyone care to comment? Me and Leanne both bought peace scarves as 'protection' for Britian and, more importantly, France. I don't quite understand how the students here are cancelling trips though (even to places like Spain!). I am planning on encountering some anti-american sentiment, but I doubt any of it will be dangerous. Anyway, Americans are known to be some of the most prejudiced people in the world, and all I heard about them doing was changing the name of french fries.
posted by Jon at 1:13 PM
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