Eight days in...

So, I arrived in Florence (or Firenze, as the locals call it) late Friday night (Sept. 4, if you're curious), and I met up with Christina, one of the girls in my program. She had already moved into her apartment, and she said I could stay there. After 24 hours of traveling, walking around and not sleeping, a good night's sleep on a living room couch sounded pretty nice.

Fast forward to 8 a.m. the next morning when Franco, the apartment building's maintenance man, pounded hard on the door. He had to fix something with the kitchen sink faucet. Thus, started my first full day in Florence.

Christina and I enjoyed a typical Italian breakfast of bread and cheese (they don't really do 'breakfast' here, per se, but I can't go without at least something when I first wake up), and espresso. We then walked around Florence, found our school, had wine with lunch, spoke broken Italian to people on the street, ate gelato, moved me into my apartment, met one of my roommates, ate the most delicious pizza ever and laughed well into the night.

"So far, so good," I thought.

I went for a run Sunday morning, got lost, walked to the Duomo, made sure I had the route to school down pat, met the third of four roommates, had the best pasta ever, unpacked the rest of my stuff and hit the hay.

For the next five days, take all the action and activity away from the weekend and replace it with lectures, note taking, practice teaching sessions, homework assignments, grammar lessons and a whole lot of commiserating with my 14 fellow classmates (all of whom are women, in case you were wondering). As you may have gathered, the course I'm taking to get certified to teach English as a Foreign Language (EFL) is relatively difficult. But, it's only for three more weeks, so I think I can handle it. Probably. Maybe.

Anyhow, the first week (which felt like an eternity!) is over! To celebrate, my classmates and I (and our instructors!) met for drinks Friday evening at a local pub. That continued into the wee hours of the morning, but not so as to prevent me and three other gals from waking up Saturday morning and catching a 9:30 train to Forte dei Marme...a beach on the Mediterranean! Oh my, it was fantastical! I got some sun (but not too much), swam in the sea, studied some grammar and worked off the pizza I ate for lunch by walking to and from the train station. It was a glorious day, to be sure!

Today, Sunday, was spent doing school work. Nothing exciting to report there.

Now, I'm getting ready for tomorrow's class, during which I will be teaching an intermediate lesson on adjective order. Did you know there was a rule to be followed when using a series of adjectives? Yeah. I can't wait to share that with you in person. Remind me.