Un Giorno di Spese

We only had one orientation activity today so we were able to have a full day of shopping.  We crossed the ponte vecchio and got stuck in a crowd of a thousand aisan tourists for about 15 minutes. Once free, we went to all of the saldi's going on in all the different shoe stores.  I bought a favoloso pair of boots and tiff got new leather gloves.

We ate lunch on the other side of the bridge at an overpriced outdoor cafe.  Once back on our side of Florence we went to the leather market and a bunch more shoe stores.  It is extremely crowded right now because all of the big saldi's end this Monday. I found the gucci and valentino stores but have yet to find ferragamo.

We are picking up the area much faster than I expected.  Florence is actually a pretty small city and it takes no longer than 25 minutes to get somewhere.  We definitely lucked out on our location too, it is in the middle of everything.  

We also booked one of the trips today with our school.  We are going to go to Venice from February 26-28 which is the weekend of their famous carnival.  Everyone buys extravagant masks and wigs and wears them around the city.  They explained it as a classy mardi gras.

Topher would fit right in here because toy poodles are by far the most popular breed of dog in florence.  All of the dogs here wear vests, even the huge ones.

Tonight is our welcome dinner for all abroad student programs within Florence so there should be a ton of people there.  We are planning to go to one of the disco's afterword so it should be fun!

our apartment building

were on the 2nd floor

view from our window

having a morning latte at caffe michealangelo

ponte vecchio

 apartments over the arno river